


A Frigid Landscape

by nigellecter



Series: Brangioji Mažoji Sesutė (dear little sister) Nigel x Mischa [1]
Category: Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-10 22:34:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 21,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7863799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigellecter/pseuds/nigellecter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In light of their dear brother's death, Mischa and Nigel try to cope in a world of darkness when a devil takes revenge for their dead brother's doing.</p><p>A RP Thread between little-lady-lecter and nigellecter. (Mischa / Nigel)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Humming quietly, Mischa shuffled several old photographs around on her desk. Two were of her and Hannibal, playing together in the woods. The other was of her and Hanniabal as well, but there was a large rip on the side of the photograph, as if someone had been trying to remove a portion of the photo.

 

“Nigel,” she began, “Did this picture…used to have you in it?” Sadness crept into her features as she held the picture up to give it a closer look.

__

A keen gaze transfixed upon the slatted horizontal laths of the Venetian blind, the inky night settles deep onto their house, drowning in an incomparable tranquility. His dextrous fingers are at ease, not hurried nor languid against the well-treated curve of the barrel, a thumb pushing each bullets with an almost inaudible click which he only perceives by the slightest drone. He’s perched on the bed, cross-legged, the permeating golden glow painting a poignancy of the past and the current moment.

 

Slowly moving his neck in a pendulous manner as he briefly glances the tangible record of his corporeality taking the very place within the still moment still bores within the trace, he nods imperceptibly. Severing the visual record wouldn’t be enough for such a poignant recollection to leave him in peace. “I’d rather have myself as an onlooker than the participant.”  

___

Gritting her teeth, Mischa absently ran her pale fingers through her hair as she carefully placed the photograph back into the table along with the others. It didn’t seem to belong; an outlier among the rest, she thought. Seeing them together would have been something pure in the unsettling world the two siblings resided in together.

 

Leaning back on the rustic chair, she glanced at Nigel sitting cross-legged on her bed, dim lamplight flickering across his worn face.

 

“I miss him too, you know. Despite everything that …” she paused, biting on her lower lip.

 

“Despite everything that happened. But deleting yourself from your life … from _our lives …_ won’t change anything.”

 

Her face softened. Mischa folded her hands in her lap over her plain evening gown as she willed herself not to grow sad as she often did upon thinking of Hannibal. Being strong for Nigel was something she felt was more important than anything else in their lives.

 

“You know that as well as I do.”

__

A soft clutch turning into a caress upon the frame of his revolver, his firebrand, undaunted gaze of before turns more so doe-eyed with the onslaught of emotions. His moonlit gaze spilling forth as the darkness engulfs the light inside him. Slowly but surely as he fails to emerge from this particular nightmare. He was like a shell of the person he once was, with the recollection of Hannibal’s lifeless form, splotched with rustic blood as its festering wounds had permanently etched the desiccated skin. As the faded marks agglomerated upon the ephemeral snapshot of the effervescent lives they once had, he now associates the vanishing memory as the sheer rate of decomposition. It stuns him as well as makes him incapable to overcome the longing.

 

“I didn’t fucking give much thought then,” he wished he gave more damn about it back then, instead of straying away from them like an untamed stallion all the time. “He’s no fucking individual you can simply let go, he’s not a silenced corpse who went up in flames.” He didn’t believe in the afterlife or reincarnation, yet he wishes Hannibal’s soul sitting adjacently with them, looking down at their pensiveness.

 

“He was the light of dawn, to us, upon his obsidian darkness and a harbinger of grandeur. You know fucking well he wasn’t just an older brother who was in charge.”   

___

Sighing, Mischa pressed her lips together, feeling the heavy weight of his sorrow bare down on her shoulders. She ached to hold him, to tell him that everything was okay. But everything wasn’t okay, and that unspoken truth hung heavy in the air between them. It was like trying to breathe through a film of thick fog.

 

“I didn’t say we ever had to let him go,” she said. She swallowed the lump in her throat before continuing. “I just don’t want you to think that this is something that can be helped by distancing yourself. He was my brother too.”

 

She stood stiffly, cracking her neck. She had been observing those old photos for quite some time, relishing in the memories of laughter and childlike innocence. Her body felt stiff and a bit sore, but nonetheless she remained standing. As a young girl, she too felt haunted by the memories of the blood. Her brother’s corpse, as cold and still as the frigid landscapes of Lithuania. Her mind was calmer now. But the memory was still there.

 

“It wasn’t your fault. None of it was. We were young…”

 

She tried a small smile. Her lips were chapped and her skin felt tight around her bones, but she’d be dammed if she let on that she was breaking too.

__

He could feel the emotional distress metamorphose into a feverous heat, pushing through the coiled larynx until his own inside turns into a desolate barren desert. It would be an understatement that his heart was enveloped in a glacier icicles, piercing the chambers until the aggrandizing ebullition would burst him open. Then, a unquenchable and inextinguishable wildfire, his typical embodiment of fury would sweep him whole to reduce him down to carbon and stardust. He couldn’t bare to face the dawning day when sliver of orange glow would take the vivid incitement of his memory, bubbling with high-perception and swirling colors.  

 

“I want him here, not here,” a quivering palm, too fuelled with burning grievance clutches over his too-tight button down, then moves to tap his temple, where he bore the wound; a concave skull. He had almost joined its perpetual journey down the gates of limbo. Blood sucked out from the gaping gash, trailing down the trembling expanse of Hannibal’s prominently defined cheekbones as the other had breathed his last. Through a heavy miasma of crimson and impassable fog, long sleep had sucked him in as darkness engulfed the light, slipping further under each other’s skin.

 

Fingers trace the raised edge, gnarled with sensitive skins forming beneath the fingerprints and the scab trailing the jaggedness. Violent and potent, startling colors that form the last chapter of Hannibal’s life. If he could unspool and pluck that out to be permanently preserved without ever to suffer… But human memories didn’t work that way. It’s quite disturbing and devastating.

 

Shifting his hips and unwinding his legs, his palm, along with his longing gaze pouring with poignance, trails the length of Mischa’s porcelain flesh. Breathing out as a chillness tauts his spine, he cranes his neck to slowly advance, searching for the absent warmth.  


	2. Chapter 2

“I do too, Nigel. God … it’s all I ever want. But he’s gone.  _ He isn’t coming back.”  _ Mischa took a frantic step towards the bed, frustrated and lost inside the spinning vortex of her own grief. She wondered if she would start yelling, perhaps even begin to cry. If Nigel couldn’t accept the simple facts laid out before him, Mischa felt she would have nothing left to hold onto.

 

Her nightgown felt so heavy, hung upon her shoulders like a curtain of misery around her thin frame. Mischa never ate enough, not as a child, and certainly not after the untimely death of her eldest brother. Maybe soon she would shrink away into nothing. How blissful a thought.

 

“You never talk to me about it. Your memories are much stronger than mine. I was young, and we had such an age difference between us … I know this has been hard for you. But I don’t want it to be, Nigel. I’m your sister. And I love you.”

 

_ Always, _ she thought.  _ Always, always, always. Until the sun bursts apart and the earth crumbles away. _ Always the lonely girl, pining after her brothers for companionship and affection. Her hands were folded stiffly in front of her, but she was reaching out now, silently begging for him to take her hand and spill his grief into her welcoming arms.

___

The weight of Mischa’s words, aggravating in significance with each syllable, perturbs his already stirred maelstrom of dashing body of water.  _ He isn’t coming back…  _ The sentence serves too surreal, both spellbinding and calamitous. Even as identical twins only born apart an hour and paramountly same, that stretch of time gave a leeway for them to be drastically different. He won’t be ever the same, Hannibal had been a clutch for stability upon the whirlwind of intense emotions and along with Mischa, the only presence capable of abating the storm of vengeful fury, him as that very embodiment as he carried himself out to the world. A kettleful of boiling water going down his throat, the frightful burning, searing and scorching feel spreads down his chest as he feels himself swell, skin beginning to tighten. Twisting, burning until the balloon bursts open.

 

Death had taken a form of a hovering hawk, as the aggressor did, gazing from afar, with an inky shadow camouflaging him with an easy stride as he had effortlessly swept down with the carrying wind. Presented upon as a layout of a convenience store. Then, it was all over in a blink of an eye - a curl of smoke drifting out the top as the unfathomable depth of Hannibal’s maroon had stilled in eternal rest.

 

“It’s fucking hard to articulate, we share too many memories, yet every damn thing is an overstimulation. I feel like…. I’m going to fucking burst open,” _ and it wouldn’t be a mere shattered teacup _ . He’d either overcome this or be totally subjugated by blazing passion, resisting to be neutralized even with well-deserved justice.

 

Through all the pungent bitterness and rueful sting of their shared memories, the truth begins to dawn over him. _It wasn’t all over. He still had Mischa,_ _the one whom he would give everything away._ His bereavement turns beatific with reciprocated words, turning into a zephyr along a bundle of dandelion seeds. “I’ll make sure I’ll double the effort, what he couldn’t materialize,” fingers entwining with hers, he leans towards the crook of her neck, brushing a sensuous kiss over the curve. “ _Just like_ how his lips slipped away, I couldn’t fucking hear his last words.” 

___

Perhaps that was a start, she thought. That was something concrete, something he was allowing himself to share with her, and her alone. She could feel the weight fading, de-materializing with each breath and confession spilled in the confines of her small room. Their hands clasped together at last, Mischa felt more steady on her feet. Always a man of strong stature and poise, Nigel seemed so small, sitting on the white blanket that settled over her twin bed. As if he were the little brother she had to protect.

 

“It’s okay to feel afraid,” she whispered. “Or … feel like it’s all just too much. You don’t have to hide it. He meant more to you than I could ever imagine. I know he loved us both, but what you two shared was so incomparable.” She was smiling now, genuine and pure as she gave his hand a gentle squeeze. So small in his. She wished that she didn’t seem so breakable next to him.

 

“We have all the time in the world,” she murmured. “And one day, we can talk about this without fear of falling apart. It doesn’t have to be now if you don’t want it to be.”

 

The gentle kiss on her throat made her skin tingle, like the simple touch had gone straight to her nerves. It wasn’t entirely alien, as the siblings had shared many intimate moments, surpassing the level of comfort that was present between most blood relatives. They had shared enough tragedy, enough loneliness, to know that they were all that each other had.

 

Her free hand touched the place where he kissed her, fingers curling beneath her hand. A breath in, and out again, before she brought his hand to her lips and placed a tender kiss in return to his weathered skin.

___

The revelation had served as a crackling life, that sliver of light beneath the rim of the darkness and horizon where the disappearing light glowed with its lusciousness before bidding farewell to yet another day to come. The effect is almost  _ instantaneous _ , as if the sultry day gleamed bright and dazzling. His own hazel tinged with grief and ruefulness, punishment and pain, unhappiness and despair dissipates with a brimming ember of the torchlight contained within his soulful hazel, now dripping with soft caress of affection.

 

“Fear is the most primal affection of a prey, something which I do not associate myself to ever be,” with the slightest hint of virulency, he could feel the serpentine hiss slipping out between his clenched teeth. His jaw set and lips stretching in a straight, horizontal line. He could literally feel the brewing emotion turning into a brimming white foam, turning gale all the way from his core to consume the vessel, which seems to be too minuscule to his expanding intuitiveness. “He’s gone, but not entirely, I could still feel his damn breaths, the reverberating baritone against my tympanum, those fucking eyes that seemed so perceptible.” He thought Hannibal could resurgent from his death, like an immortal, from the charred ashes where his essence resided  _ still _ .  

 

“This doesn’t feel like I’m breaking myself apart brick by brick, it’s a fucking demolition. I would be the same bloody muscles and sinews on the bed of crimson spectacle.” His own slender fingers seem undetermined, weaker. Where had been his persistent drivenness when he had pull the trigger upon that damned bastard? He had watched the man fall upon the very earth that had taken their eldest brother. As if soils gnawed on their incapacitated form, one had emerged  _ triumphant _ , not exactly victorious. The thought of himself painfully lonely without Hannibal had spread like a profound radiation, a cancerous cell metastasizing to consume his whole.

 

_ No, he wasn’t alone, nor he would ever be. _

 

The warmth from her skin still lingers, now permeating through his whole corporeality as a small stream converges to let himself be liberated from that lament. Now the electric kiss serving more as a catalyst, his gaze is nothing but in adoration and effectual caress. He’s already pressed against her chest-to-chest, without barely touching.

___

Mischa settled beside him, her rustic bed springs groaning under their shared weight. The sound was quiet, but it quelled the roaring silence thundering in her eardrums after he finished speaking. Softly, she rested her head against his shoulder, fiddling with the hem of her gown. Mischa couldn’t make it better. She couldn’t bring Hannibal back to life; nobody could. And it had town the two remaining siblings into fragile shards, too sharp to touch.

 

“He died saving me. That man … that man wanted  _ me. _ Hannibal stepped in just in time, and then you …” She took a shaky breath as tears sprung to her eyes. “You both saved me. And now, I feel the best way to honor him is to live a life that makes us both happy.

 

She squeezed his hand tightly, sniffing back tears that refused to yield. God, she wished she was stronger. She wished she could be the knight in shining armor that sprung through the pain and the sorrow. She  _ wished _ this were easier, that she could just move on and live a happy life with Nigel and whoever else may one day walk into their lies. But it was so hard, and she was crumbling.

 

“I want his memories to be happy ones. And I believe that on day they will be.”

___

A kind of electricity seem to brew and gather inside his core; a strange sense of power agglomerating to form and settle itself deep inside his hazel eyes. The space which they occupy turns almost intangible, as if he’s drowned out all the silence, as black and obscure as death itself. It was his own epitaph, an unintelligible one that grow into broken fragments of the tombstone Hannibal didn’t have yet. He thinks about his own brush with severing of the mortality. As much as Hannibal seemed immortal, his damn  _ humanity and virtuosity _ , that _ fucking love _ had reduced him to be all muscles, aflame with sporadic quivering as he breathed out his last.

 

Having stood multitude of times behind the smooth trigger, he very well perceives the resurgent feel of  _ powerfulness _ , the strange chill flaring all over his outstretched limb as the bullet churns Hannibal’s inside like a clump of unquenchable fire. Of his eyes that had given out the indisputable order for the life to be extinguished.

 

_ Not once in his life, he had faced a frightful sense of doom. That cloudless night had been one. _

 

“Then we should live our given life with a glorious feeling of excitement,” winding an arm around Mischa’s waist, he feels that familiar prickly feeling, a bundle of small needles press against his caved skull. Through their shared DNAs and the breath and blood he retains in defiant defence, he would live like a fire burning bright.   

 

A thumb stroking over her too thin stretch of skin, he could feel his own tighten as the searing feel press against the back of his eyeballs. “Lamentation will soon burn us whole, but he  _ deserves _ a proper one. Then we’ll fucking smother that smoke out and build ourselves back from the ashes. He deserved to be mourned. It’s okay to break down.” Soon, that heatstroke would metamorphose into a wave of calm, but  _ not now _ . 


	3. Chapter 3

Mischa squeezed her eyes shut, but even that could not ebb the harsh flow of tears and screaming sorrow that left her feeling hollow and shaken. She cried into her brother’s shoulder, cried for the memories they would never have, for the life they would never get to build. She cried for the one who saved her life and raised her from a little girl. The three of them were all they ever had, and now a gaping hole was all that was left.

 

“N-no, you’re right,” she wept. “It’s okay to be sad. I just don’t want you to think you have to be so outside of all of this. His life was mine. It was yours. Seeing our picture ripped apart like that frightens me, Nigel.”

 

She looked up at him once more, blinking back the tears that blurred her tired eyes. She suddenly felt years older, like her sorrow was aging her bit by bit until soon, she would be nothing left but dust across the frozen ground. The thought made her feel nauseous, and she quickly shoved it from her mind.

 

“Just promise me you’ll talk to me when you need to. That you won’t shut me out.”  _ Because I love you, and sometimes it’s so, so confusing.  _ Maybe she would no longer be able to discern between the love she felt for her brother and the love exchanged between two wayward lovers, shoved against a backdrop of tragedy.

 

“Promise me.”

___

Finding their forms rocking in a silent, almost lulling rhythm, he feels a particularly scalding teardrop contour through the ridge of his nose, then descend to paint its potent stroke over the corner of his lips. Condensed with emotion as his entire form molds along with his sister’s, caught in a stellar collision with no point of return. An event horizon of both  _ nihility _ and  _ over-stimuli _ . He could feel the fiery core beating and splurge like angry fists; the impact along would make a mountainous wave to leap up and swallow everything in its path.

 

There would be no fighting it, he welcomes the rush of blaze. The air growing thick and heavy with suffocating onslaught of unstoppable momentum. There was a beauty in  _ destruction; _ like barren landscape full of ash is beautiful, when a combined force of rush of light and the lick of nature’s mighty force would soon make the desolation to effervesce with lush forest.

 

“I couldn’t fucking help,” an audible swallow, before feeling the lump in his throat tumble down the steep hill of his throat. “all those still snapshots made me to think about my own mortality, I could easily been that fucker’s second victim. I could feel Hannibal grow colder as blood turned to ice. I couldn’t bare to leave you alone.” He sways as if he’s going to faint, as a twister from the storm clouds tear through his brain tissue.

 

_ Weren’t people made out of stardusts and other elements? _ A tangible form made up of deconstructed atoms and breaths. Finding Mischa’s words grow to be a loud patter of the rain quenching the sun-baked earth and fill up the crevices and fissures deep within his heart, he finds his chin dig further into his sister’s small frame, as if engulfing her further.

 

“I  _ promise _ , you’ll be the first one to know.”

 

_ Because I only have you in this fucking life. _ He fights a billow of fog consume him further as they break through the impenetrable obscurity.  

___

“I know,” she whispered. She sensed his fear, the tensing of his muscles against her arm, the forced repression of terrible memories that were thrust into their world like a plague bestowed upon their broken family. Wearing them down, until it felt like they would soon join their lost brother in whatever world he would move onto next. It left everything feeling so  _ cold, _ despite Nigel’s soothing warmth.

 

She lifted her head, furiously wiping away the tears that had left a stain on Nigel’s shirt, leaving her cheeks damp and flushed. But despite their sorrow, she managed a small, hopeful smile.

 

“Hey.” She nudged him gently, playfully, hoping she could take his mind off the harsh topic. “Did I tell you I got a few of my journal articles published? We have a few extra dollars if you want to go and get something to drink. Maybe take our minds off this mess..

 

She gripped both his hands in her own, like a girl would a lover. It never felt strange or unnatural to her, and in light of their circumstances, the simple touches were more important than ever. Her smile wasn’t forced, but it would be quite a long time before the action was no longer something she had to give thought to. Happiness would not come easily for the surviving Lecter siblings. Nevertheless, Mischa was relieved that he welcomed her presence, both physical and emotional. It made this whole  _ mess _ so much more bearable.

 

“it would be nice, maybe. Unless you’d rather we save it. I’m so tired, but today has just been … “ She sighed heavily. “It’s been a  _ hard, fucking day _ and I think we deserve to relax.”

___

Feeling like sinking in the bottomless swamp, but then he knows the extend of just _how_ _much_ he could sink. Threaded mercury drops within his veins would soon dissipate, coursing through his pale veins beneath his hardened, rough skin. If he could subside the feeling of his heart, threatening to push beyond the cavity he could hold his permeating emotion in. Soon, the whirling blaze gets put down within a swirl of icy coldness, his mind hurtled through the blackness of the space full of celestial bodies, wheeling and whirling like ferris wheels.

 

When a strand of emotion - his  _ doubts _ ,  _ vulnerabilities _ , and most startling one being the tenacious pull of  _ regret _ upon the untimely demise of  _ their _ clutch upon the world turns like galloping stampede of the untamed beasts, he lets it _ detonate _ . It wouldn’t be ideal to turn itself into a self-destructive tickling time bomb. Letting those virulent venom wash over like the blooming blood of that very fateful night.

 

Even when they’re not speaking with the press of their hearts, wrapped in each other chest to chest, Hannibal’s illusory presence upon the pulsating throb of his beating heart seems  _ undoubting _ . As if he had been slipping a bit further into his brother’s skin with a resurgent sparks in his chest and fire in his veins.

 

He lets the last lingering salty fluid disembogue with his preexisting ones before setting his tightened lips in a horizontal line. A genuine look of surprise crosses his features like a gradually radiating lightbulb, the light refusing to only to be contained within the vessel. “No, you fucking haven’t, that would be nice,” with the last bit weighing down him gone, the liberated, slightly uplifted vibe enters through his system. It’s those little things that count, like the way Mischa’s smile forms and the easing body gesture. “I’m more than happy to chip in.”

 

That alone is more potent than the bitter chill which had engulfed the room as he begins to feel his heart leap with a small clearing.  

 

A thumb swipes across the back of Mischa’s hand, branding her with more soaring spirits. “I’m fucking exhausted myself, but I’d love a fucking wafting breeze of bibulousness suffocate the air of acrid fumes of tear gas.” A slightest ghosting smile lifts the corner of his lips as his hand slithers to pluck themselves off of the mattress, as a jangling set of key in his hand serves as a chime upon the change of uplifted shimmer of mood. 


	4. Chapter 4

A gentle laugh escaped her lips ( _ this was the Nigel she missed, the brother she wanted _ ), happy at last that things seemed to finally begin to come together. He was  _ smiling _ , and the very sight filled her with immeasurable hope. Stretching her arms, she smoothed out her gown, brushing off the dust before giving Nigel one, lingering kiss on his cheek.

 

“We’re gonna be alright, Nigel.  _ You _ are going to be alright. I promise.”

 

She drifted to her closet, shuffling through the odd assortment of clothes she had gathered over the years. Dresses that were too small, Hannibal’s old pants from when he was a boy that somehow managed to fit her. Button-up shirts. Most of Hannibal’s old clothes belonged to Nigel now, but the few articles that he had grown out of would now be Mischa’s to keep. Being the only girl in the family, it was a little odd taking old clothes from her older brother, but useful nonetheless.

 

“Do you know who that man was?” she asked cautiously as she slipped out of her nightgown (acutely aware she was undressing in front of him, she kept her back turned, although this was mostly out of courtesy to him). She didn’t want to dampen the mood, but she had seen the news after Nigel had successfully killed him. She was ready to drop the topic if need-be. “He was a servant of this rich … man. Some meat-packing estate down town. I think we used to pass it on our way to school each morning. Do you remember? I think you had asked me once if I wanted to go pet the pigs one day and I was too frightened because they were so big.”

___

The center of his eyes gleam with a slight mischief as lips twitch with the deepening sense of steady calm flaring. That stubborn resistance embedded deep in his inflamed muscles, that feeling of being tugged backwards by the threaded memory abates, along with the sight of the vivid horror. Serving as a complete  _ paradox _ . Things so familiar as he had been a harbinger of those very insist,  _ desperate _ strength of grip towards someone else, now turns against him to ricochet that deep sense of dread to thud into him.

 

His ebbing and flowing breath soon manifests into a purr, like edge of the candle flame fluttering within his core, brimming with life as it stretches, before soaring away like some kind of bird in an uprising. Hannibal’s death wouldn’t oppress him further than as of now and that pungent bitterness and rueful sting of the hornet’s prickle now turns to become tangible warmth, giving him a sense of power and drive to go onward.  _ He will be missed, but never forgotten. _ Through their quotidian lives, his presence and influence would spill forth. That’s one thing he confides in with an utmost certainty.

 

“I’m sure if missing him comes in waves, then tonight I should fucking drown and welcome that, we should move on and let that feeling etch within our brains.” When he feels, it’s always a  _ wildfire _ , never the crackled embers on a bed of coal. Intense and consuming, leaving a devastating wreck in the wake, both fevered and exhaustive. Yet, it would be the only night he would let this sorrow be the lighting gasoline of that catalyst.

 

Brushing past Mischa with fingers drawing a caressing arch upon the curve of her spine, he rummages through a few hangers to find one of Hannibal’s more casual blazers, a rich dark umber the color of a well-worn calfskin. In the midst of slipping an arm inside with the key still clutched close against his palm, he turns over his shoulders, slightly dazed at the new strand of information. Most likely, he would’ve still been unconscious, under the mercy of the strong dose of morphine pulsing through his pale veins beneath the limp limbs that didn’t feel like his own. “Verger Estate, that’s all I fucking remember, but I haven’t paid enough attention to that fucker’s name,” he could feel the blood race through his core as the expressive hazel glazes with a blaze of surrounding silence.

 

He feels like all of his veins corroding with rust, valves bursting open inside him with a regenerated anger. “Now I think I want to fucking  _ slaughter _ that pig and make him into ham hock soup.”

___

Goosebumps sliding down her back, she hummed a little under her breath, more than pleased with his gentle caresses. Scrunching her nose, she reached out her hand and allowed their fingers to brush as he walked past her, smiling as she pulled on an old button-up shirt that had finally fit her. Riddled with tiny frays and loose threads on the sleeves, it was comfortable with the wear she had gotten out of it over the years. Hannibal had worn it when he had been younger than her (he and Mischa had always shared similar build, with thin frames and narrow shoulders) and it had fit her at last, even if it did hang a little loose.

 

“Amen to that,” she murmured. “I for one am sick of burying what isn’t meant to be buried.” She straightened out her shoulders, giving one, final passing glance to the black and white photos on her desk. They were memories, she reminded herself. Not to mock her of the happiness of the past, or to remind her of the hardships of the future. Only memories. Snapshots taken of time well spent.

 

“They didn’t connect the servant’s kidnapping attempt to anything involving Verger directly, but I know there were rumors about his charges for pedophilia and sexual assault on his end. Luckily for him, he probably has enough money to keep those rumors just as they are: rumors. We’ll be careful, okay? Just…” she trailed off, laughing a little at her brother’s expense.  _ Protective as always _ , she thought. “Just try not to do anything rash in the meantime, okay?”

 

She placed her hands on his shoulders, hopeful and pleading, her chest rising and falling with careful breaths as to not disturb the calm mood. Silently promising that she would be  _ fine _ . That  _ nothing _ would ever come between them.

 

“Please.”

___

It wasn’t just sheer madness that had turned his veins into rusted stretch of tubes, threatening to break open at any given time. With each heartbeat, he feels the surge of desperation, like an oasis turning into a mirage. Even if he knew it would be a deceptive concoction of his mind, he still feels naked with the subject of anyone who got too close to Mischa; the man had already attempted to take her away once, and almost had succeeded. Not anymore, not in this fucking life or next. There had been a staggering amount of responsibility placed upon him now that Hannibal was gone. Strange that they were both ferreting out for Hannibal’s garments; love was indeed like a mental illness, they were learning to cope with the chronic nature. No amount of drug nor built up tolerance would do him good. Passion over reason and all that. He would let the sensation totally subjugate him until the burden eases off from his chest.

 

“Such a transfixed snapshot could elicit too much thinking and feeling. It’s fucking terrible,” that’s exactly why he had tore down the eternal memories etched down to both his heart and brain, manifesting into a dark, mountainous wave that would make him drown every night. He’s gratefully breathing beneath the water, just under the surface so that he could smell and taste it than letting it become too unbearable. He doesn’t need more of his inner demon to consume him further than the mere thought of it sends electric charges flaring in his chest.

 

Even evil has standards and of course, he didn’t feel remorse for killing those who deserved it. Mischa’s words immediately sends his hard, rough skin to bristle, sending rush of crackling fire in his veins as he shudders in repulse. “That is just so fucked up, why haven’t I been aware of this?” He has his ear on ground for this sort of things, yet his mind draws a complete blank and that both frustrates and utterly shocks him. Haphazardly shuffling his arm through the other sleeve, he rolls his shoulders and turns over to face her, his hazel dripping with both virulent venom and syrupy honey.

 

“I’ll be careful if you are,” fingers fasten through the buttons of her shirt as blood slowly turns to ice, that familiar chill he feels before sealing the fate of an individual. It’ll be vehement task, but not completely undoable. And he does thrive with challenges.

 

“I fucking assure you, I’ll take precautions.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Like I said. Just rumors. But when bastards have money, even the genocide of a people can be swept under the rug as just that: fucking rumors.” She shivered uneasily as she finished buttoning her shirt. Passing an uneasy glance to her brother, she felt his rippling anger roll off of him in waves of fury. People like Mason were terrifying, if what was whispered about him was to be true. Mischa had given so much thought to her dead brother that she hadn’t considered that Mason’s men could very well return.

 

Mischa stood very, very still as his fingers curled around her shirt, feeling a chill creep down her spine that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. He was angry, angry and desperately protective. And she couldn’t blame him. She placed a gentle hand over his, her teeth reflexively biting over her lower lip, eyes tracing down his chest. She gripped his hand tightly, if just for a moment, before hastily pulling it away.

 

“Of course I’ll be careful,” she said firmly. Her words seemed to run together, her mouth non-compliant with the thoughts she was dying to articulate.

 

She gently placed her hand on his cheek, warm and rough against her small hand. Gentle, placid, and what she hoped was reassuring. Brushing her thumb against his jaw, she quickly kissed him on his cheek, smiling (if, perhaps a bit sadly).

 

“I love you, Nigel. You don’t have to worry about me.”

___

He wasn’t a true believer of rumors; he was sure, through his damned bones and fiery veins with fervent zeal when it came to sprouting such a  _ degrading  _ one, there would be a slightest sliver of truth had been planted in it, albeit cherry picking those evidences that would be advantageous to their assertions. He was used to being on the opposite end of the spectrum when he was accused of mutilating one of the victims he had killed out of spite. He had rashly lashed out and although it only passed to be a speculative act, he couldn’t entirely pass the skeptical eyes of his henchmen. Simply, it meant he could easily blend in with the others in a quotidian life, as well as be the one who was capable of causing a notorious crime, borderline  _ taboo _ . Like Hannibal had said,  _ there’s no moral, only morality. _

 

He would be Mischa’s fucking living armor, an  _ aegis _ upon those unmentionables. Even when he’s tangible form occupies the very space where he feels his own booming drum beating like hide skin as tension coils behind his eyeballs, he could feel the ends of his fingers disintegrate as if he had been slowly cremated -  spawned flame combusting every nook and cranny of his body, as it dances across spinning brightness of whirling colors.  

 

He lets it burn, that inextinguishable flame turning him into dusts and ashes. Through the booming cacophony of obliterating emotion, his gaze is that of a shark looming over the dark waters. Moving in an  _ autopilot  _ as he trails his slowly moving fingers, just focusing on a biological need in order to contain the needless anger he cannot fathom to unleash.  _ Not now. _

 

Mischa’s hand immediately plucks him off that whirling vortex as a fresh air floods the atmosphere. His own face is deeply etched and pinched, with stormy thundercloud looming over his head. Somewhat dazed both with the splendor of potency her hands has on him and still entranced with the smoky gray air he sees, he feels his throat click with a hard swallow.

 

He breaths a bit easier as he fastens the topmost button on her shirt. Instead of a response, a soft zephyr-like sigh rattles in a bit of abated anger as a wave of calm washes over. His thumb strokes over her knuckles, trailing slowly before firmly taking a hold of her hand. 

___

Any words she wanted to say were stuck, caught between the longing caverns of her heart and her voicebox. She thought about the man ( _ What did the papers say his name was? Cadwell? Cordell? She was sure it was Cordell. It hardly mattered now…) _ , her brother’s murder, and Nigel’s desperate attempt to save her. The attempt that had worked. He had killed a man to fully ensure she would be safe. She felt a nagging sense that perhaps she should be  _ worried _ about this, that within that desperate action there had to be something  _ not right _ , but it hardly mattered. She knew Nigel. He would only kill someone if absolutely necessary.

 

“Maybe we should … go,” she said quietly, referring to their previous talk of getting drinks. She kept a steady grip on his hand as she spoke, fearful that if she moved, this moment could be shattered forever. Memory was such a  finicky thing, she thought.

 

“Unless you want to stay, of course.”

 

She slowly dropped her hand from his cheek, keeping their fingers interlocked by their sides. Safety. Warmth. Reassurance. A silent promise of  _ I’ve got you. We can get through this. Everything will be okay. _

 

_ I love you. _

 

“For all we know, we’ll never have to hear Verger’s name ever again.”

__

Carrying on the personal vendetta was easy. Maybe it was too close a fatal dose of  _ adrenaline _ or  _ stupidity _ on his own part, but he would be more than  _ prepared _ , by letting him immerge himself within that getaway to the past; a surefire kindle and gasoline as the sight of red stain engulfing Hannibal’s chest becomes remarkably beautiful, yet  _ wretched _ . An  _ aubade _ dedicated to their sempiternal orchestra of twisting, elongating and suctioned requiem drumming beneath the fluttering walls.

 

Crimson shackles upon his appendages turn into an efflorescence of lotus flower, dwelling in the most contemptible place of all. With Hannibal, every brutal choice had elegance and grace - his own blossomed in a whirling dazzle of white flames. A deadly alliance of balls of fire and icy pricks that would overload all the other senses. Nothing could ever touch him and bring quiescence.

 

This kind of drowning pain, was exquisitely beautiful - like falling in love for the first time is beautiful, the perpetual attraction between iron and carbon is beautiful. That rush of energy you get as a surge of blood trailing the folded coil of your throat is beautiful. And that last intense, nerve-wrecking emotion vanishing into the air enchants him with absolute power.

 

“No, we shouldn’t stay. I’d let the emotion ventilate in itself while we let this all go. We fucking won’t forget it, but this bitter ruefulness has to all go.”

 

It’d be their coup de grace, being lost in dark silence and complete oblivion. Then, through the air of consolation, he finds his pores seeping with sustenance. “To our well-deserved bibulousness.” Letting his eyes drape shut with calmness, the flaring radiation from his head lessens immediately. 


	6. Chapter 6

She nodded curtly. Indeed, it was a very, very good idea. Mischa felt wearily exhausted, not in body, but in spirit. She felt she’d surely collapse if she had to endure this another day. Mischa made sure she was decently dressed, running a comb through her thin, often-unruly hair. She turned to straighten Nigel’s shirt (smoothing out those darn wrinkles accumulated from years of wear) with a playful wink, before pushing the keys into his hand.

 

“Alright. You’re driving then,” she said. Holding tightly onto his hand, she gently tugged him out the door and into their old car, surrounded by the woods and trees. It’s what she loved about where they lived. With the old house passed down by their parents, they truly were lucky considering how early they had been orphaned. As the chilly wind nipped at Mischa’s exposed cheek and throat, she closed her eyes briefly, imagining the wind of her home could dust away all the grief that had threatened to pull them into a never-ending ravine of madness.

 

Their drive to the small little bar was quiet, but not uncomfortably so. Mischa gazed out the window in thought, only tensing when they passed the gates of the Verger estate. Far away from the road, the vast mansion loomed like a black shadow, always watching. Keeping tabs. She shifted in her seat, and was relieved when they finally passed its ugly stare.

 

“Go to the place you took me when I was still underage,” she giggled, recalling the memory with fondness. “I had my first beer there, I think. We snuck out when Hannibal was at work. I don’t think he ever found out.”

___

Even when he feels relatively at ease, there’s a lingering thread; never fraying, holding a stubborn clutch upon his twisted heart and lungs as he hears his throat click. He couldn’t simply slip to and fro that welcoming respite Mischa so aptly suggested. He wouldn’t fucking botch up and let his ribcage spread wide apart with the desperation making him drown in a field of crimson. Through a comforting hand placed upon his chest, he defies that stagnant and burdensome gravity, that would be his eternal stigmata. His tightly set lips feel like the rice paddies splintered all over due to long drought. Crude, irregular and jagged wound on his skull, in his heavyhearted nonchalance, a previous hint of gaze as desolate as his imminent fate.

 

The obsidian streak becoming only blurred strokes upon equally dense sky, the clumps of clouds seem to hold that eerie portent. The lush denseness had been a source of protection, towering defender upon all things malicious. Yet, even something that seemed a divine intervention couldn’t prevent from the grim reaper’s deathly kiss.  

 

Just how effortless it is to slip into that mindset when they had been young, playing their own mischievous game of sneaking out beneath Hannibal’s paternal, observant eyes. Just how appropriate to find such a  _ deja-vu _ of getting rid of such morose thoughts emerging as Hannibal’s pale complexion and his own fluctuating pulse thumping against his eardrum. The contusion spreading like a sinister aura soon clears off with the pouring, naked emotions.

 

_ No more fucking shedding tears and dribbling blood. Certainly not tonight _ ,  _ nor it would ever happen to the Lecter siblings. _

 

He watches Mischa, with his eyes heavily lidded, slipping back to that unruly, unkempt boy who had been subject to Hannibal’s constant nagging and cautions, as if he had been wearing a fake mask of a domestic cat, while he truly was an untamed big cat.

 

“How can I ever fucking forget, it was pouring rain, they didn’t have any seats inside, so we were accompanied with endless splatters of coldness in the midst of November. Do we want to repeat that in order to pass the time?” 

___

Mischa found herself laughing, truly, genuinely laughing with all the freedom and vitality of a bird released from its cage.  She thought of how silly they had been, how angry Hannibal would have been, and how the three of them would have, one day, been able to laugh about it together. Of course, it had been pouring down rain. And the beer had been disgusting to her, at the time. And Nigel had been scanning the crowd for any sign of men who perhaps thought they were entitled to talk to his little sister. She had felt so grown up, breaking all the rules with the brother that wanted to give her a taste of the life they so rarely got to live.

 

“I’d  _ love _ to,” she said. “I really, really would.”

 

The bar, of course, was just as she remembered. A bit of a dive, loud music, and loud men with their wives and girlfriends and lovers, current and soon-to-be, by their side. But it was nice. It was  _ freedom, _ in every sense of the word. As they walked inside, Mischa felt Nigel beside her with every step, wanting to reach out and hold his hand again, to let him know just how happy she really was. It wasn’t like anyone would know they were related. To everyone else, it would be as normal as anything. But regardless, she felt self-conscious, like somehow there was some horrid secret she had to hide from the rest of the world.

 

They ordered their drinks (this was her first publication money well-spent, she thought) and walked outside together finding one of the small, solitary glass tables to sit at together. Overcast and cloudy, the gray wall of clouds loomed above them as the sun set below the horizon. The night was young and beautiful, and they weren’t alone.

 

They talked, but not excessively. The two siblings knew how to enjoy one another’s company in the silence, with the occasional remark and smile as they thought about the future and contemplated the past, long behind them, but so painfully close.

 

And when they were done, they toasted to their brother, wherever he was in the land of the dead. It was a promise to always remember him, and to always move forward and better their lives on their own. For it was true that they hadn’t lost everything; they still had each other.

 

Once they were home, Mischa announced she was going to bring in their clothes from the line outside before it rained, and that she would be back shortly.

 

“I’ll be quick. I don’t want to get rained on.” She turned to him, a softness masking her gaze, before she opened the door.

 

“Can I sleep with you tonight?”

___

The night unfolds just like how he used to remember; except the opposite weather and the cool lick of more than bearable night wind carrying the ruckus of drunkards, bar-hoppers and casual throngs alike. Teetering between slipping beneath his hardened, grim straightened face and flinging endless daggers at those who got just too close. Like a dark guardian and Mischa as the bright light source that would deem an inextinguishable patch of balancing illumination. The perfect balance where Hannibal’s incomparable brand of wickedness. He was filled with too much ire and vigor that not even the strongest bond could override. Although slightly abated, he still had a tendency to stay out late and preferred the warm, effectual glow of club lights whenever he got a chance. Of course, now he preferred Mischa’s caressing arms as the whirling vortex of mind-numbing eletronica and shots like tickling bomb was long overdue. There was always that, and the rising body count at the hand of his gun had to be regulated.  

 

They’re trudging down their separate, yet disemboguing roads. Hoping, wishing in persistence. Three of them destined together to join their forces in trinity; Hannibal as a mystic warrior, himself as a rogue brawler and Mischa as their healing enchantress. He’s like an embodiment of the shadow you’ll find every single inch of space. Where the light is, its counterpart would be there as an eclipse.

 

With spilling streaks of vivid pigments as their backdrop, the straight whiskey burns through his throat, more like an open blister. He’d welcome all the evidences of his hardships of his drifting spirits and bare the onslaught of elements against his skin. An impressive collection of scars, both visible and beneath the chambers of his steadily contracting ribcage. Through sweltering heat and overcoming the wildest blizzards, their determination and persistence had tied them in an unbreakable bond. Maybe this was that intersection where they would forever part, though the journey would be sempiternally etched within every cell. Roads twist and turn, come to a dead end, sometimes you fall into a quagmire and bottomless pit.  

 

Through percolation and mulling over within his reverie, the widened avenues and boulevards stretch and narrow into compacted alleyways. The world reducing back down to being themselves yet again. Pleasantly buzzed and having taken that bend to pick himself right back up again, he could feel their journey being picked up once again after being at a stalemate. A much-needed break upon the untimely denouement of the ongoing chapter.

 

The weight of his gun, still seeped with Hannibal’s blood as it laid upon the wondrous flesh and spectacle of crimson would permanently change his perception towards it. How his own sanity and mortality had been placed upon the very soil their brother’s lifeless limbs clutched them, with the last remnant of fleeting warmth. His soul might be still floating around the very atmosphere they resides, less tense, more easier to breath without feeling the fluttering surge of scalding salt.

 

“Be swift,” craving a rush of calming nicotine, he suppresses his thought of trailing right behind her, but decides against it. He had played her bodyguard enough at the bar, they both didn’t need it at their residence. A little spark of excitement crosses the center of his glittering hazel, embodying the celestial bodies, scattered like uncultured pearls with Mischa’s last words.

 

“Have I ever  _ fucking _ declined that offer?” 


	7. Chapter 7

With a playful cock of her head, Mischa’s smile could have illuminated the room with her happiness and warmth. She promised him she’d be quick, hurrying out into the gentle sprinkle of rainfall that had already began to descend from the dark clouds, concealing the moon and all of her stars. Mischa loved the way the forest seemed to loom before her in the dark, and never hesitated to sit outside and listen to the sounds of wildlife when nobody else was around, given a night she couldn’t sleep. But tonight, Nigel was waiting for her. She didn’t think she’d have any trouble sleeping anymore.

 

She gently unclipped the clothes from the line and placed them in the basket in her arms, humming quietly as she went. Crickets chattered in the brush, and somewhere far above, she heard an owl call from the tree line. She heard what could have been footsteps, too. Normally she would have dismissed this sound for another animal (years of living by woods had diminished her fear of creatures lurking in the dark), but given the recent events, Mischa hesitated.  

 

She didn’t give it a second though, only hurriedly gathered the rest of the clothes from the line as the rain began to pick up. It was time to go.

 

She turned, basket under her arm, ready to rejoin Nigel inside, when something hit her from behind, square in her back. With a loud grunt, she dropped the basket and stumbled over, getting a face full of wet leaves in dirt. Frantic footsteps approached her from behind. As soon as she registered what was happening, it was far too late.

 

“Grab her,” a voice said. She went to scream, but someone had clamped their hand over her mouth as another set of strong arms grabbed her from behind and dragged her to her feet. She kicked and thrashed against her hold, but the two of them were too strong for her small frame and thin arms and legs. She bit down on the hand that covered her mouth and tasted blood, only to be greeted by another strike by the large object across her ribs, and went nearly limp with the pain.

 

Something sharp stuck her in the neck, making her body grow heavy and dizzy. Her mouth formed Nigel’s name, but her throat couldn’t make a sound. As she was shoved into the back of a large vehicle, her vision dimmed and tunneled, until there was nothing but black.

___

No nymph or fairy or angels of any kind could be as beautiful as Mischa right now, as her radiance and effervescence spills onto the room once weighty, grim and obsidian darkness had seeped into like miasma. All jagged edges with bitter cynicism towards the dead; this dead being whoever the fuck that bastard was. Even when Hannibal’s corporeality, his profound presence that permeated so much through their blood and flesh, had been charred, reduced down to ash and stardust. His raging fire contained beneath the orbs which seem to sway in a pendulum. He could get used to this instinctive manifestation of fondness and affection, as she had a sole power to stultify him. His common-sense had long approved this concept; that his inclination had compromised his everything when everything else slept. Perhaps it was the slight intoxication that made him feel this way, but everything was an overstimulation at this point. 

 

The intermittent patter manifests itself into a sparkling diamond dust upon his scalding skin, brimming with emotion. Feeling like a wayfaring tourist in his own mind, he plucks a cigarette, pretends to be at ease with the last stretch of fraying uneasiness coils through his core. He could literally feel his body giving a gentle tremor as the sensation alone serves a gateway to their past. A surefire key to their union after Mischa had plucked right out of his grip so many times. Knowing she would always return to the very place, their safe sanctuary like migratory birds would, the thought haunts him still. 

 

With his back pressed against the closed door, spine curling like a languid cat ready to snuggle into her embrace as the world drowns in continual drums, faster than his whirling mind. Almost insistently, the blinding light etches through the sky in an instant as if it had been signalling him an eerie portent. Then, the weight of the spoken words become a sonic boom when he hears a voice, something strikingly familiar that sends a flaring electrical current all through his vertebrae.

 

In the midst of dragging through the initial swirl of smoke that form a faint gestural mark upon the inky black, the gradient of the moonbeam seem to widen as he almost drops the cigarette which had been perched atop his voluptuous lips. Barely perceiving the multitudes of shadows conjoined into one coherent, swaying form, the familiar anger, that fucking spark upon the bed of coals, threatens to spread his ribcage apart.

 

Fighting his initial instinct to retrieve his revolver to chase after them, he hides like a predator at large, slipping behind the door to get a better view of the sight. The sky seem to explode, translating the unspeakable anger licking taut against every expanse of his skin. As much as he wants to tail them to follow them to Verger Estate, he waits and ponders. He doesn’t need to summon his predatorial instincts to rescue her and bring her into his arms - all he needs to do is to wake up from this fucking nightmare, fight through this flaring frustration that he wasn’t completely sober. He would stalk the night until a sliver of light permeates through the darkest niche of his mind.

 

His nimble fingers busy themselves from preparing, as he grabs the fallen cigarette. Determined, as his lips thinly stretch even further, he rummages through the small arsenal he had within his duffel bag. A few pocket knives which could be effectively hidden beneath his trousers, a backup glock, with extra cartilages to bring down the entire fucking squad.  

___

Mason Verger, in short, was satisfied by the events unfolding before him. Nudging the lever with his two mobile fingers, his wheelchair whirred forward into the large barn where Carlo and several of his men were tying Mischa up in one of the pens (one of the  _ cleaner _ ones of course, wouldn’t want her pretty shirt to get messy so soon before the show). He smirked; the little bitch was coming to her senses, although all she could manage were a few whimpers of protest. Even if she  _ was  _ strong enough to somehow free herself from her bonds, there was no way she was getting out of the padlocked cage. Surrounding her were dozens of squealing, shrieking pigs, banging at the sides of their cages with their tusks, aggressively trying to reach the smell of meat coming from Mischa’s side of the barn.

 

“Splendid,” he said over the noise. Watching from the upper loft, his mangled voice echoed through the barn. “I hope you’re nice and cozy down there, Ms. Lecter. It’s where I like to keep my guests of honor. Not even my most prized pigs get to stay in  _ that _ fancy pen.”

 

She didn’t say anything. Probably still woozy from the drugs they pumped her up with. Or maybe she was just stupid. The Lecters probably had some form of inbreeding down the line. It was a shame there would be no time to have his way with her. He supposed he could always do it with Nigel watching. It was something to consider, but it would be so  _ tiresome… _

 

“Cheer up now! Can’t have you looking all pouty for our guest of honor, can we? Don’t worry, dear. I don’t think he’ll keep us waiting for much longer. You Lecters are known for your…manners, aren’t you?”

 

She said something angry that he couldn’t hear. He didn’t care, particularly, but he was sure it was a nuisance. Moments later, a servant came running into the oft of the barn.

 

“Sir. He’s here. Carlo has him detained outside the barn.”

 

“Excellent!” Mason twisted his malformed lips into an imitation of a smile. “Bring him up. It’s almost time for us to begin.”

___

He treads with caution, abandoning the idea of making his entrance with his motorcycle in a heartbeat. When he is constantly fighting with a losing tug-of-war between coming up with more effective scheme to breach into the stronghold of the Muskrat farm; he had seen it numerous times before, but never past the slatted iron gates that seems even more impenetrable than when he had been a scrawny child. As the weight upon their sanity, their presence as Mischa’s promised words continuously thump into his tympanum like a gong. All he ever wanted had vaguely caressed his fingertips, only to be whirled away from him like an exquisite dream too good to be true. As he slips beneath the constellations of bright and unknown stars as he maps out the uncharted areas of her alabaster form. Drawing him into the  _ abyss _ of her.

 

Feeling the heaviness like an atlas, but never burdensome, it’s a challenge he would take multitude of times without ever percolating. His heart was at charge and his brain didn’t even stand a chance against the boiling thundercloud that accumulates within his aggravated heart. His highly intuitive mind quickly sketches out a croquis, the internal mapping of the place. Well aware of Verger’s sadistic elevation of torture and Mischa being the prime pig to be savored upon, he figures she wouldn’t be held within the squalidly pen where the rest of the pigs waited their miserable slaughter.  

 

Dispatching the two guards had been easy; nothing to obstruct his view, with the stark chiaroscuro of dazzling light and the darkness as deep as inky ocean surrounding him whole, the backdrop of advantageous illumination swiftly brings them down in a limp heap. Two determined whoosh through the breathlessly silent air, full of his unrelenting fury, only to be matched upon the whirling vortex beneath the active volcano. As if a spell of dark magic had taken over his form as it robbed him of all its joy from mere few hours ago.

 

Hurried fingers rummaging through the dead men’s pockets, he quickly pushes off the vehemence of the iron bars, an initial layer down upon the quest for both their resurgence and liberation. Like a battle cry upon the imminent carnage, overbrimming with confidence and reassurance upon the spilled blood, his cautious guard frays over the edge, just enough to be ambushed by two men, who had been surveying the grounds.

 

“Ah, look who has made his grand entrance, a gun-toting bravado full of macho,” Mathias and Carlos mock Nigel in derision as they encircle him like two voracious hyenas. Heaving a breath as Nigel lets his venomous hazel do all the talking, his hand hovers just over where he had hidden the blade when Mathias breaks the fatal silence. Only to be greeted by Nigel’s determined sweep as the gleaming silver connects upon his thigh. A fountain of blood erupts from the severed artery as the man simply clutches his legs, his face contorted in pain as the soil seeps with a deluge of crimson.

 

Before Nigel’s triumphant smirk sketches through his cruel lips, Carlo’s taser kisses Nigel’s side, his vision immediately doubling as he bends over, dropping the blood-coated blade. Eyes roll, the wretchedly bright sky turns into a sliver of hope as he collapses onto the very earth where death had almost brushed his kiss. 


	8. Chapter 8

Mason was, in a word, impatient. It wasn’t like he could go out and check on the damn cocksuckers to see if they were doing their jobs, even if he did have a high degree of trust for the two men. They were to bring the boy in alive so that he could watch his little whore of a sister be devoured. Really, Mason was looking forward to the spectacle. Mischa was still screaming for them to let her out, banging her head against the side of the pen where she was being kept. Around him, Mason listened to the melodic screeches of the boars, underfed and itching for a meal.

 

Mason was growing annoyed. If the bastards didn’t hurry, she’d either kill herself or knock herself too senseless to put up any sort of fight.

 

“If you keep screaming, I’ll have Carlo cut your tongue out,” he informed her from above. That seemed to shut her up, although the pounding continued.

 

Moments later, Carlo and a heavily-bleeding Matthias hurried into the loft, dragging a half-conscious Nigel between them. Mason was pleased; stripped of his weaponry, the boy was no more than a sack of weepy horseshit.

 

“Mr. Lecter. Welcome to Muskrat Farm. Sorry for all the dramatics, but I didn’t want to waste any time, you see. Stand him up, will you Carlo? I can’t see the pretty boy’s face.”

 

Carlo forced Nigel to his feet, and Mason made a strange facial movement that mimicked a smile. Nigel Lecter was surely a specimen to behold. He had those Lecter eyes and cheekbones that made the whole lot of them look like little dammed angels from above.

 

“Well aren’t you just gorgeous,” he wheezed. “I bet your sister can’t even resist the likes of you. Do you wonder if she ever dreams about fucking you, Nigel? Why don’t we ask her– Mischa! Your older brother is here. He wanted to know if you ever think about fucking him.”

 

Mischa was already screaming her brothers name, insanity driving her voice to a harsh croak. She pleaded with him to run, to find help and to get out while he still could. But she couldn’t see him. He could be dead for all she knew. All she could hear was Mason’s raspy croak and the shriek of the wild pigs, hammering against her ear drums and sending spikes through her heart like shards of glass tearing at her bare feet.

 

“Well, in my humble opinion, I think watching someone be eating and fucking are inherently the same thing. Derives a wondrous sense of pleasure to the central nervous system. Gets the blood going real good.” He paused, relishing in his words, before continuing.

 

“I did want to ask one thing before we began. Do you know where your brother was the night before he died, Mr. Lecter?”

___

Teetering between a sliver of alertness and shutting out the abomination he surely would face in the hands of the most diabolical and fuckfaced muck-poop he had ever seen through the splitting pass of incoherent imageries, Nigel could see Hannibal’s face in its utmost clarity. Hannibal had wordlessly passed him with a fleeting brush of Nigel’s shoulder, yet he could sniff out the permanent weave along his flayed heart. Yes, Hannibal still had kept some of his nocturnal habits surreptitiously to himself and Mischa and he had been oblivious to the exact details, although he could guesstimate Hannibal’s penchant for Machiavellian manipulation as he became a fallen archangel, who morphed himself as a harbinger and a collector of corrupted souls, sowing the undeserved creatures within his arms. Mason would be at the  _ pinnacle _ of it all.

 

Nigel had witnessed and gone through Hannibal’s death, with his own soul suspended in air, on the cusp of trembling down like crashing comets from the outer space, acting as an unstoppable ticking time bomb. If he could ever grasp a tenacious hold on his consciousness, then he would seek to sever that repugnant hidious ball into half and let the pigs gnaw him into indistinguishable gunk.  

 

Not an entirely alienated concept regarding his own sealed fate. It wasn’t a mere curiosity nor letting whatever Mason had been holding onto his rein to see where it would take him through the projected tracks Hannibal himself had constructed. He doesn’t need an  _ explanation _ to see it through the last fraying, honed gaze to register the deserved atrocity that had committed by Hannibal. Perhaps it was a genuine entertainment Hannibal himself had sought upon, as if his astral body had dominated over both of Nigel’s mind and body. Finally finding his equal in the midst of sounders and immaculate.

 

They had invited him into an endeavor full of Mischa’s casting light, that eternal spark hiding beneath her obstinate resistance to cast out the wretched fate.    

 

Slipping an eye open as a heavy mist sets forth through his muddied gaze, he tastes both his own blood and salty sweat and tears, combined to set his sky on fire. A slight frown to confirm that radiating heat between his eyeballs is from his broken nose with the abrupt fall earlier. Still defiantly shooting arrow tips full of potent venom through his scraggy matted hair and letting his fury run rampant through rippling surge of boiling magma, he could feel the phlegm rise deep within from his coiled throat. His adam’s apple slowly pushes towards his sharp jaw, along with the lurking shadow of smirk tilting his lips.

 

“She dreams of castigating your fucking cock and feeding it to the pigs, before she shoves a fucking rake up in your paralyzed ass,” resisting the tightening hold as his wide and powerful shoulders push through the armor of steel, he could feel the distinctive click of the metal cuffs around his bound wrist to his back. “I’m going to excoriate your fucking discrepant poop-face and slap it onto equally ugly fuckface over there.” In his disparaging fulmination, he spats right into Mason’s twitching beastly lips. 

___

 

Mason squinted his eyes. Irksome, he thought. This boy was  _ irksome _ . Muscular and dreadfully dramatic, too. It would have been cute if Mason didn’t have an agenda to attend to tonight…a  _ dinner _ he would be sitting in on, even if he would not be the participant in tonight’s event. He blew a puff of air through his lips when the portable respirator allowed it, clearing some of the thick saliva from his lips. 

 

“Tut-tut, Nigel. Spitters are quitters, don’t you know that? Goodness, what a terrible cocksuker you’d be. Anyway. Matthias, Carlo, bring Nigel on a walk with me. We aren’t going to leave the barn, don’t worry. There’s just going to be a sight… _ change of plans _ .”

 

He nudged the lever on his chair to turn himself from the pig-pen and down the loft. His back was turned to the three men, but he wasn’t concerned.

 

“Nigel, I want you to know that I offered your brother a job. He was seeking new work. Good-paying work, and I was more than willing to offer. I am known for helping those less fortunate than I, since it is God’s will. He would be a pig-keeper, and I thought I would show him around a bit before he accepted. I showed him where the unfortunate children would stay, I told him all my favorite parts about being around kids. I even showed him the room in my basement for _ special _ guests, that was a fun one. I made a few comments about your sister, but oh…he didn’t like that. You know how I know? Because he came back. But it wasn’t to accept the job.”

 

Mason stopped at the other end of the loft, next to a large bucket filled with a thick, red liquid.

 

“No, it wasn’t to accept a job. He drugged me and told me to cut off my own face. And then he pushed me off the barn loft, this very one, in fact, and I broke my neck.” Mason smiled again.

 

“I decided to take Mischa and rough her up a bit, just to get under his skin. For a little…payback. I had my ideas. But then  _ you _ came along and messed everything up. Startled Cordell right out of his skin! He shot Hannibal in a panic, from what I understand. And you shot him. But now…you’re here. And so is she. And everything is going so splendidly.”

 

Mason didn’t address the bucket of blood beside him, waiting for Nigel to speak.

___

He doesn’t have to listen to this ridiculousness and his first instinct had been right - where unchecked fury overrides the peaked curiosity of this beastly man wearing a human’s disguise. He was the most wretched pig on this goddamn screwed world that needed to be slaughtered the most. And thanks to Hannibal, he had manifested himself to being exactly the one he thought. This man, completely engrossed in a paradox of society as he had been aware for the fact; this man actually donated to Baptist church and made a charity work of taking those unfortunate children to be fed and nourished. Just like how the Lecters had been at once after their parents’ passing.  

 

At least Hannibal had a sliver of humanity left, being the most stubborn, responsible big brother and father figure to the younger Lecters, however chiding and almost authoritarian he got sometimes with their mischief and Nigel’s own brand of straying off like a nocturnal cat. Thinned lips cruelly quirks up in a fleeting smirk before exhaling in the other’s direction.  _ If he had a fucking cigarette…  _ Even then it wouldn’t have bring his state of mind to a fleeting peace and bring the swirling maelstrom to be subsided.

 

Speechless, he merely shoots more virulent daggers through his wavering hazel, dripping with contemptible venom as a lock of his ashen blonde hair curtains around his deeply set almond eyes. And that virulence before manifests itself as a paroxysm of animosity.  _ Why couldn’t all the demons of their past and this particular brand of wretched world and the demons fade away?  _ All he needs to savor is the vanishing warmth of Hannibal’s body embraced with his own and watching Mischa sleep in the dark, filled with nothing but his own breaths and light. “You’re one sick deranged fuckface. I’m glad Hannibal has returned the favor you had it coming for so long.” Now he was shaking from  _ pavid _ within his own mind - even with his own skewed morals, he would never, ever lay a hand on children.

 

Through his still blurry view and mind, Mason’s words take a few heartbeats more to process. The thought of Cordell’s bullet tearing through Hannibal’s heart, that alone makes the strands of his shoulder muscles ache with dull throb, becoming more agitated as the bristled goosebumps take over the lengths of his arms. The weather hadn’t been cold nor it had an impact on his psyche, yet all he sees is clumps of thunderclouds generating sparks of electricity, booming too close to his ears like a sonic boom. The idea of enamor metamorphoses comes into myriads of forms and he feels like Hades, a harbinger of possessive and destructive love as a single thought blossoms upon the surroundings;  _ it will be full of death. _ Where the suffocating unbearable enmity transformed into an arousing passion of bloodthirst - for those who deemed appropriate. His own passionate, yet brutal breakdown of Mischa and his tumultuous relationship had come to a closure with this fucking deformed bastard, who was nothing more than a fucking nuisance, a curse upon the Lecters’ name.

 

“What the fuck have you done to Mischa before?” The blood in the bucket looks deeper than how he perceives, and it is the most taint, immeasurable and sickening black he had ever come across. Hearing a distinctive click of his throat, he feels repulsive bile rise from the coiled cavern and he could feel his body lurch. His hazel burns like torches flaming and luminescing through the dark and everything ripples, beneath the scalding salty tears. Blazing and shining like gleaming blades.  


	9. Chapter 9

“Oh don’t get soft on me now,” Mason taunter. He rolled his sunken eyes, despite the great amusement he was deriving from Nigel’s imminent suffering. He was so fragile, like a rustic toy from the wooden chest of his childhood. One little poke and prod in the right direction and he was a blubbering mess sprayed on the floor.  _ Hopeless. _

 

“I’ve made myself right with the risen Jesus and it’s all okay now,” he said. “I’m forgiven as Jesus forgives all his holy children. Have you ever even picked up a Bible in your life?” He scoffed. “I doubt it! And I don’t think Hannibal did either. No wonder he died in such a shameful state…”

 

It was as true as the scripture he held so near and dear; the Holy Spirit was deep within him, empowering him… strengthening him. He was a God in the presence of this weak boy and everyone in the barn, even the screaming bitch, knew it. He remembered the gratification he had acquired through his power, watching children cower in fear before him, tears springing to their little eyes and dripping down their little cheeks. Nigel was no child (this much was obvious from his jawline all the way down to the bulge of his pants), but it was all the more gratifying that words had such effect.

 

Mason was a careful planner. He wasn’t one to simply let others  _ ruin his plans _ .

 

“Oh, calm down, would you? This isn’t your little whore’s blood. This is the blood of one of my sows who  _ tragically _ passed away just last month. She was a good girl, Nigel. You see, these pigs in particular are drawn to the smell of blood. That’s why they bite their tails all the time. This is where you come in; you’re going to help Carlo drench her in this sticky, gooey stuff and then walk right back here to watch the show unfold. I was originally going to have Matthias do it, but he seems to be in a near-critical condition from where you cut him up. I’m sure your little fucktoy sister would love it if you did the honors.”

___

He had been painfully familiar with coming to his senses with his own wishful thinking - almost meeting his predestined death as he felt the hydraulic dam flood beneath him. If it wasn’t for Hannibal’s bright, deviant plan, he wouldn’t be walking down the earth - Mischa would’ve been already snatched away from him, too. Through Hannibal’s sacrifice, they both earned their two tickets upon the wretched life. Coalesced and tainted with Mason’s bloody gimmick.

 

His impulsive rashness had hindered him from coming to his senses when he registered the grim reality long ago. Mason was a quintessential embodiment of everything hypocritical. His deviated, demonic assessment of the Bible.  _ Yes, he hadn’t read the Bible nor he ever wished to delve into its message.  _ Anger tauts, as he knows, not only is the other man speaking about Jesus is in a twisted, pervasive manner - distorting the meaning and form of the scripture to suit his own purpose. It has tainted and corrupted the whole place,  _ full of wicked magic. _

 

“Spoken like a true fucking hypocrite, your _oh-so-fucking_ apt assessment of my relationship with my dear sister applies with your _damned_ _desecrated_ relationship with those _unfortunate_ children, even more in vividness!” More undulating anger splurges to consume his frantic heart as a potent cynicism weaves through his emotional voice, syllables masticated with fury. Knuckles clenching tight enough to leave crescent marks upon his palm, the bubbling point stretches through the aura he exudes, as it manifests into a white flame aglow within him as he whacks an invisible jab across Mason’s face.

 

“Fucking runty cunt, you think you ever stood a fucking chance against me?” A renewed strength seem to traverse through his half-staggering lower limbs, upward to his tempestuous core, all the way up to his tanned face, the fine lines rippling with rampant rage. “You are going to be the one drenched in the fucking pig’s blood and end up where you fucking belong, muck-face,” he could feel the shackles around his wrist and feet jounce, even with the weight of them pinning him down. 

___

Mason’s face went dark, his hollow eyes narrowing into slits of disgust and barely contained rage. He nudged his wheelchair forward, getting as close to Nigel as he physically could. His rage was a black storm, calm before the torrential downpour. He himself could not physically lay a finger on Nigel, but he could turn his life into a personal hellfire. Even more so than he already planned.

 

“I’d watch your tone, boy,” he hissed in a seething whisper. “I know all about you and the tragic fall of the Lecter bastards. Mummy and Daddy died years ago, leaving three little kids to defend for themselves. I would have taken you in had Papa Verger started up that camp just a few years earlier.  You had no honor, no pride in your name at all. Now that poor Hanni-bear has gone, you’re nothing but a bunch of filth.”

 

Mason sniffed and gave a piercing glare towards Matthias, who was crouched on the ground, clutching his bleeding leg. Useless son of a bitch, he thought. It would almost be easier if he just died already.

 

“Take the stun gun and rough him up a little before it’s time to start. I’ve decided I’d like to have Nigel be in my place; unable to move his arms or legs while he watches poor, unfortunate Mischa meet her grisly end. Honestly, Nigel, it’s probably better this way. You would have fucked her up so badly she’d be in one of those freak asylums by the time she hit thirty.”

 

_ Hallelujah, _ he thought. This is what it meant to be king.

 

“Ready the blood once you’re done with him,” Mason told Carlo, his back turned to where Mischa was penned. Screaming had caused Mischa’s voice to grow hoarse and sore, her wrists and ankles rubbed raw by the tightness of the rope holding her joints in place. If she weren’t in such imminent danger, it would be utterly degrading. She groaned and tried to yell, but it wasn’t doing her any good anymore. As quiet footsteps approached her pen, and she prepared herself to be doused in blood (hoping she could at least put up a fight before she met her end) like an animal waiting for slaughter. But when her pen opened, it wasn’t Carlo, Mason, or even Nigel. A tall, muscular woman, wielding a small Swiss army knife stood there, looking down at Mischa in horror and disgust. Before Mischa could ask what she wanted, the woman cut her bonds swiftly and efficiently, freeing her at once.

 

The woman told Mischa to run and find help. Mischa, battered, bloody, and paler than a sheet, refused to leave without Nigel.  _ I’ll take them out myself, _ she breathed.  _ Let the Red Death hold dominion over all. I’ll rip them apart _ .

 

The woman, aptly named Margot, felt her desperation. She told Mischa to follow her lead as they crept quietly up to the loft.

___

A ghost of triumphant smirk stretches his thinned lips, still dripping with vile vehemence. Mason was truly a viral strand of _pestilent_ _contagion_ upon the Lecter blood and a single threat to their resounding existence. The scattered, rubbing salt upon his festering flesh, his blurring head, a fucking cockroach to be squatted upon. Nigel was an embodiment of _reptant untamed tiger_ , highly intuitive, a complete governing of his presence be bound and restrained as he is, he still had a remarkable ability to twist and prod with words. Even when he had been reduced into an useless hunk of ugly fuckface as Mason was, he would still have his smart-ass mouth. _What if he had been disarmed and without the extension of his body?_ He could still do great harm as Mason could do with his vast wealth and power.

 

“You might have inherited a fucking fortune without ever working for it and surreptitiously fuck around with those pitiful children and Mischa. I’ll rather be at a fucking ragged ragamuffin than be of your  _ motherfucking _ kind,” Carlo just returns in time to connect a hard jab across Nigel’s cheek before he finishes the trailing thought. Gathering his phlegm and blooming blood inside his oral mucosa, he spats into Carlo’s face before rolling his tongue inside his bloodied membrane. Before Nigel could fling more disgraceful disparaging remarks as his lips, snatching scythes of Carlo’s fingers rip through Nigel’s shirt as his body bends in awkward angle, the metal links clinking as his spine sharply curls. His hazel seeped with fine veins and fiery red as he defiantly jerks, he looks through his sangfroid and hard face. His button-up now completely undone as blood smears and drips through his ruffled form.    

 

Even when Nigel hears his jaw crack and a livid contusion begins to seep into his tanned flesh, he remains disturbingly quiet, with his usual piercing gaze etching into the back of Carlo’s skull. Staggering into the pen Nigel hadn’t taken in before as he continues to stare unblinkingly as Carlos drags and discards the shirt in a haphazardly manner, he wastes no time as the taser pushes into Nigel’s ribs out of the blue. Nigel doesn’t cry out and swallows, a faint undulating grunt slips beneath clenched lips as his taut body tenses. The second time around, he struggles further as his closed eyes clamp down even further, the fine lines sketched through the corner of his eyes and lips. His slanted curve still contain the cruel, lopsided curl.

 

When Carlos begins to reach for the front of his pants, something unknown crosses Nigel’s face before he feels his stomach churn. There’s a slightest hint of exhaustion over the almond eyes, but he continues to budge until Carlos strikes a hook over Nigel’s lean stomach. He immediately doubles over, spitting saliva and more blood as it trails the curve of his neck. “You’ll  _ fucking _ pay for this,” he grits his teeth and feels his knees grow weak beneath him as the taser connects against his most tender area. Breathless, his body hunch against the bindings as he tries to fold himself. With the last spark of convulsion wrecking through his body, his clenched grasp upon his consciousness frays along with Carlo’s words.

 

“Because of you, Matthias is fucking dead, he spilled fucking buckets of blood as your blade tore through his thigh,” a hint of virulence. “He’s my fucking brother, goddamnit!” A kick to almost unconscious Nigel’s groin as his sight dances across his half-lidded gaze. Staring at the dirtied ground and the repulsive stench of stale, rusted blood bombarding his senses, an onslaught of flaring pain radiates as Carlos crouches and slaps Nigel’s cheeks to rouse him from going under. “Stay with me, Nigel, you have a fucking dinner to attend.”


	10. Chapter 10

Mason sat, enraged by the broken, bleeding body of one of his best servants. His vision was clouded in red, and suddenly he was screaming. Screaming for Carlo to tear him apart, as if Carlo needed any further reminder. The man had just watched his brother die right before his eyes. As Mason’s distorted mouth twisted into a snarl of ugly rage, an unfamiliar anxiety began creeping into his chest. It was heavily unfamiliar, terribly unraveling…the feeling of plans going all wrong. Of losing the remainder of control that he had once possessed.

 

It was only moments until Mason and Mischa Lecter locked eyes from down the loft. Battered and bloody around the wrists and ankles, the tiny woman was accompanied by his sister, who had nothing in her hands but the rope that once held Mischa in place. Carlo seemed not to notice, not yet anyway, but the two woman stood side-by-side like battered soldiers in an empty field. Margot had released the girl, and whatever they had planned was not something Mason had anticipated. Mischa screamed her brother’s name, causing Carlo to look up. Mason bared his teeth.

 

“You’re  _ dead _ , Margot,” he hissed. It was not a promise, but a statement of truth.

 

“Don’t you know, Mason? We all are.” She sounded almost sorrowful. Carlo stepped forward and tried to wrestle Mischa to the ground, but Margot was quick to step in, heaving him off. Mischa was no fighter, but with Margot’s surprising strength, they were able to heave him off.  Margot wrestled the taser from his hand and knocked him upside the head once, twice, and again, before delivering an electric jolt to his temple. Mischa was already at Nigel’s side, his blood covering her hands from the deadly array of his injuries.

 

Somewhere far away, Mischa heard Margot and Mason screaming at one another.  She touched his face, whispered his name, kissed his cheeks as she prayed to a God she didn’t believe in that he was still alive. When she found a heartbeat, she almost cried in relief. Mason’s voice felt like dozens of spiders swarming her skin, filling her with a sick rage that made her stomach turn in nauseating somersaults. She must have looked like a madwoman, her blonde hair sticking to her face, blood splattered on her arms and hands, and her clothing caked with pig feces and dirt.

 

“You’re sick, and you’re going to Hell,” she said, her voice creaky and raspy from wear. “No God is going to save you.” Mason was dangerously close the edge, and he was screaming now, fingers twitching and grasping at the lever on his chair. With two swift kicks to the side of his chair, Mason was tumbling off the loft, hitting the ground with a sickening crack of a broken bone. His gurgling breathing from below told her he wasn’t dead. Not yet.

 

But by the time Mischa had come to her senses, Margot was already at the lever that would open every pen at once. Their eyes met as Margot wrenched it down, releasing all hell down below. But with Mischa’s back turned, Margot’s scream was the only warning she had before Carlo climbed to his feet, and shoved Nigel down into the mass of screaming pigs.

___

Blood drops suspend in the air, like Nigel’s held breaths upon the plunge as his body folds over and over again, on the cusp of eternally trembling down as glittering jewels, polished and raw, opal-like crimson splatters mar the very earth his Mischa would have suffered.  _ How significantly wretched that he had finally accomplished a sliver of vendetta as he watched Matthias crumble just like Hannibal had in cold blood _ . And how insignificant his own corporeality seemed now. Fraying, fading, like fluttering candles in the midst of the approaching thunderstorm. Soon, his almost naked body contorts in pain, his voice lost in the multitude of flaring radiation as the sensation becomes that of a soaring tower of Babel, rearing up into the sky. Then, everything would detonate and his own body would join Hannibal’s buried remains - like layers and layers of secrets,  _ the dead remains silent _ . He would never know Hannibal’s true intentions, hidden beneath the most unlikely locations. His own would be in his heart and brain.

 

His tanned canvas seeps a field painting full of mauves and deep purples, a few avant-garde pieces of his bating breaths and gaping gashes over his pectorals, where the raw flesh shows through. Carlo’s bravado around Nigel’s strewn body, propelled up like a pig carcass upon the hook, his bound wrists making his torso to slant at an acute angle. His staggering feet locked in a mobius’ strip of teetering brink of dislocating his shoulders. Legs like cooked spaghetti, Nigel helplessly watches a spray of blood, erupting from his shoulder as his head falls even further. An act of mortifying submission on his part as the only thing enliven by the gesture is his glaring hazel, set on incinerating fire as he watches Carlos burn behind his eyes. Through dividing and splitting shapes and dimming haze, Nigel’s lips imperceptibly slant lopsidedly as he scents Mischa. Before the visual, it’s her distinctive scent - the scent of such tenacious life upon the desolate snowdrift, as a sprout peeks over the soil. Seeds of chrysanthemum spilling upon the stretched field.

 

When enough of his senses return as his body gets a reboot, his half-lidded hazel, tinged with blood and a mountainous peak of his swollen cheek greet him first. As vision hones further, it turns more rapturous and provocative. He’s between the realm of something remotely close to a deep slumber and a wretched alertness that won’t leave him alone as numerous hornets continue to sting upon the gashes and sensitive, exposed skin.

 

With Carlo already disposed of as he stays where he belongs, along with his brother as extirpated ants, Mason’s croaky, arid voice instills a contrasting spark of energy. Midst of all the opprobrium and malignant vortex of etched croquis, her burning kiss and lingering traces of fingertips overwhelm as the potent sensation nullifies every evidence of Carlo’s malignant hand, his despicable tangible record which he will gauge and wipe off. If he could just shut the unnecessary intuition and just let him be. He would be a  _ narcissus _ , his unsatisfied desire directed at her, as he lucubrates upon minute curves, swaying back and forth in the wind as he looks upon the sun.   

 

The ear-splitting cacophony turns into the most beautiful and sensual serenade as he hears the distinctive crack. Even before then, his perceptive spatial sense registers the untamed hogs would trample down the diminutive and wretched soul gets shucked off from Mason’s body like a snake shedding its skin. He’d soon reduce into an inert heap of worthless clump of viscera, blood and meat - if he could ever become salvageable enough for what’s left of him to be plummet into the eternal ring of fire.

 

Before a triumphant smirk sketches through his bloodied lips, an ungraceful  _ coup d’etat _ upon his liberation soon falls short. Tumbling down the steep angle as his head spins more with the initial impact, a lump of fire churns within him as he struggles on his feet. Wavering, serving Carlos as his shield upon the unrelenting stampede of the hogs, most of them are busy at ravaging through their former master and few turns at the scent of Nigel’s fresh stream of blood. Summoning the last ounce of strength left to ram into Carlo’s side as Nigel watches him topple like the last piece of domino upon the revolution, a projection of an agonizing scream tears through his lungs, as a husk jabs through the back of his right thigh. Having brought down to his back once again, he puts up a formidable battle with his inflamed, close to being atrophied muscles and barely manages to pluck himself off from the imminent harm’s way.

 

Then, a fluttering drape shrouds in darkness,  _ like a feed going off.   _

___

 

For a long, wretched moment, Mischa stood at the top of the loft in frigid panic. Wildly, she thought about God, and how she had never consulted Him for any of her past woes or hardships. She had always gotten what she needed in one way or another. But a dawning realization struck Mischa in a smothering wave; _ she was in Hell _ . What she was experiencing now wasn’t pain or suffering, anxiety or worry. This wasn’t what she felt when her parents died on that tragic, winter day, or when her deceased brother was taken from her by a monster in human guise.  _ This was Hell _ , in every instance of the word she could possibly imagine. The screams. The sounds of ripping and tearing and the cracking of bones, the rancid smell of feces and rotten food. Her head spun. A harsh groan escaped her lips. It was only Margot, yelling that he was still alive, that brought her back to reality.

 

“I have to get down there, I have to–”

 

Mischa didn’t waste anymore time. She rounded the loft and practically stumbled down the short set of stairs that took her down into the bloodfest. Her stomach twisted and threatened to release what little content it had upon the onslaught of the rancidity. Mischa only just managed to force back the bile gathering in her throat enough to reach Nigel who was kicking at a large, pregnant sow that had found her way to him on the other side. Lifting him under his arms, it took every remaining measure of her strength to heave him to safety. The sow wouldn’t give up, even when Mischa struck her on the nose with her fist and tried to kick her belly from the front.

 

She really couldn’t believe it. Somehow, they were alive. Pulling the gate shut, the sow roared and banged her tusks against the barrier between her and her food, but to no avail. Soon enough, Carlo’s now-ravaged corpse proved to be more interesting, and she settled for that instead. Mischa could hardly tear her eyes from the hideous Rat King of pigs, still squealing and shrieking as they finished the monster Mischa had hand-delivered to their ugly mouths. She and Nigel were safe. They had fled from Dante’s lowest level of Hell, and now we’re sitting ducks in the next. She knelt in the dirt floor of the barn, Nigel half-slumped in her lap, murmuring false promises that it was all going to be okay.

 

_ He could be dying for all she knew. _

 

“Nigel,” she murmured. “Can you hear me?” Margot, shaken and shell-shocked, joined them. She said something to Mischa, but it all sounded very far away, as if she was speaking in a dream. She needed to hear  _ his _ voice, just a single word or sound that signaled that he was going to be okay. That would tell her that everything was truly over, that all this hadn’t really been in vain after all. Blood hammered in her ears, dizzying her senses, but still she waited to hear that voice of reassurance, the light in the dark of a never ending cavern that would tell her that they would be okay as long as they were together.

___

No human being could let one to be drowned and permeated upon the most blackest black he’d ever seen. Not even himself had been tainted with the abominable ebony of the eternal pit, where charred soot and sweltering bundles of coal wrapped around him like an indestructible chain to incinerate and weave through his skeleton. Through festering wounds and field paintings of colors more effervescently blooming like the meadow full of touch-me-not, the coagulated stains of red engulfing his chest and face blending in with the dark despicableness become abated. A continuous whirling tap-dance across his vertiginously spinning head continues to drown out the external sensations and perhaps it would be better to simply forget, wipe out his memory as simply, this had been the most ungainly waltz he had participated in. The art of reviling invective as he had been cheated out of the most ludicrous brawl. The long-drawn acrimonious struggle finally coming to an end with Mason’s blinding extreme state of rage as he had been disguised in anthropomorphic form; now a barely tangled crimson mess of tubes and lumps, indistinguishable disorder of carnage.   

 

Just a bare streak, a little glimpse of the incomparable horror wheels by him as his limp body struggles to make it to the cross line - the distinct boundary between  _ life _ and  _ death _ . The split nanosecond, through his fluttering heartbeat tenaciously pumping out blood to keep him at bay. For the second time and too concurrently, he gazes into the  _ crippling fear _ that hinders him from seeing the fantastical ghostly form of his brother. Instead of concrete, hard-edged boundaries, Hannibal is reduced into puffs of whirling smoke. Almost like a manifested form of the maelstrom, residing forever within him like a strand of his DNA.

 

The hellhole is a compacted filth of bones with tidbits of flesh, as if gnawed upon by the mutant rats themselves. Along with rivers of blood, as inexorable and unspeakable sight as it is, glares towards him like a nonchalant and merciless gaze of a predator’s blackened orbs. Like a vehement beast guarding the limbo as he himself passes through it all. Glistening like black opal under the pitch-black sky as the inferno in him rises from the very core, blaming himself for not being there hours prior.  _ No, that’s the last fucking thing it’ll happen and for me to see. And here I was, completely engulfed in an arousing anger, swallowing him whole as the tremor within him transformed into a cloying scent of adrenaline. _

 

When the fate decides to twist its course again, like so many times it had between the Lecters’ tumultuous relationships, he fought with valor and relentlessness. The lightened burden as the disquieting corruption lets go of his bound limbs over the iron gate. The red dripping fingers slowly curl, a hint of clinging life kissed upon the fingertips as the fleeting life plummets back to his form. Hannibal is gone, his multitudes of shadows and his enmity - now allayed by the veniality of Mason, Cordell, Matthias and Carlos’ death. It doesn’t mean Hannibal’s defrauded life would return.

 

_ Maybe in his dreams. _

 

The unquenchable bonfire, heightened by the smear over the voluptuous lips of a caustic mark which burns through his skin as Mischa’s voice kisses over his skin like gentle wave of the water’s edge. A cool whip of air beneath the unbearable heatwave from the asphalt.

 

“….I…  _ Fuck _ …,” a ghosting brush of his lips upon her scraggy form. His spine bends, his heart constricts as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer. Dazed, alert, yet pendulously fading away and conscious at the same time. “I’ll be fine.” 


	11. Chapter 11

A rigid tension Mischa didn’t know she was holding seemed to ebb from her muscles in a rush of bitter delight. For a long moment, speech seemed to fail her, for she was so relieved she just wanted to bask in the physical release of horrified revulsion and terror. She was laughing now, laughing and crying and shaking her head as she kissed his cheeks and forehead. Bloody and broken and ripping at the seams;  _ the true Lecter legacy, _ she thought. A family of survivors and memories.

 

“Of course you are,” she breathed. “Why, what would we do if you weren’t? We could never leave, could we? We’d have to just…stay here forever…We couldn’t have that, no, no, couldn’t have that…”

 

She was speaking rather hysterically now, babbling in the relief and aftermath of whatever kind of  _ Hell _ had been delivered to their front door. It wasn’t until the Verger sister (the very same sister who had just watched her brother meet a grisly end, Mischa would later contemplate) laid a sturdy hand on her shoulder and told her it was time to go.  _ Time to go, _ she thought. As if there would really be any escaping all of this. As if this moment wouldn’t haunt them for the rest of their lives.

 

Margot was the one who helped her lift Nigel into Mason’s old wheelchair and and wheel him out to her car. She was the one who drove them back to the Lecter home, who hoarsely apologized, her voice dead and hollow ( _ apologies were for break-ups and spilled milk), _ hardly able to shed a tear and said that she would tell the police it was an accident, and that if they ever needed anything, she would provide it in an instance. She told them that the police would question them, but Mischa didn’t mind.

 

She just wanted to go home. And after a hug, another battered, desperate apology, and a promise to check in on them, Margot left them be. It was time for her to go, too, wherever was left for her to go to. Mischa would later read that Margot and Mason had been orphaned at a young age, much like the Lecter siblings had been. No family except for the two of them.

 

With Nigel resting on his bed, Mischa went to work. Their mother had been a doctor, and had worked right out of their home. She had left them everything from bandages to low-grade anesthesia, and as a nursing student, Mischa knew the basics of what she could do for her brother now that they were safe. It took a long time, and a lot of pain on Nigel’s end, but it got the job done.

 

“You should be okay in a few weeks,” she said in a monotone voice, sitting beside him on his bed once he was bandaged and loaded up on painkillers. She placed a glass of water on the table beside him, realizing she hadn’t tended to her own wounds. Truthfully, she couldn’t bring herself to care.

 

“You should sleep.”

___

Once he lulls back into a whirlpool, entrapped beneath the vortex of obscurity and daydreams, his dimmed senses honed, the droplets became streams again as the vigor drains from him in pulses. The breeze sighing and licking over the expanse of his neck, all the way down to his abdomen as a faint sheen of sweat accentuates the character-defining pin-up girl tattoo. The skewed realm beyond this place seem like a heaven he wouldn’t reserve a ticket to, and with spite of all things happened, he would truly believe some individuals was as tainted as clump of tar that needs scrubbing. In the silence of his skin and bones, his all-encompassing pool gazes with both molasses and whiskey. Dulcet sweet, softness exuding as well as there’s an undertone of caustic bite behind them, like poised daggers, refusing to retract as he contemptibly looks back to the cursed ground of Muskrat farm.

 

The body’s instinctive and inadvertent nervousness soon replaces with the strong surge of adrenaline licking over his spine. The final  _ triumph _ upon their survival as Mischa’s elation transpires into a heart-moving speech. The declaration of their  _ well-deserved, unexpected victory _ . Sparks of electricity surging through the whole length like a sweet release. The sky is painted across with technicolor of reds and dark oranges spreading like a inextinguishable wildfire, accompanied by the dusk falling on the brooding manor of the grandiose farm. He had lost the sense of time, though he could still hear Mason’s wicked gravelly voice, his strident malignancy jabbing him, despite his  _ annihilation _ .

 

“Even if I fucking die…. I’d be…,” along with strings of unfinished thoughts, he finally lulls into unconsciousness - he could feel his facade crumble as he takes Mischa in further, he could feel his usual cold and collected frontier he always puts along with the others, his outwardly gesticulation immediately begin to disintegrate. The fortified walls of steel and stone turning instantly into a glass castle built on sand, also his nerve of steel liquified. More than the spoken words, it was the utmost trust upon his threading life.  _ If he leaves Mischa, with her movements so innate like ebb and flow of the beating sea, fragile yet tenacious. The embodiment of moving with unhindered fluidity. She would be fine with the beefcake bodyguard. _

 

Hannibal doesn’t appear and everything gets a murky coat of white - it isn’t the pristine, pure white he associates with his dear Mischa, but the weathered, old, grimed white that appear more beige and light gray. Every inch of his muscle continues to emit a series of high-pitched scream as his body had been paralyzed in an invisible mold. Becoming a fixture as he drowned in his own rusty, pungent scent of blood and abhorrent flow of purulence.  _ The red vessel  _ torments him further as a dribbling drop becomes a continuous stream, then Hannibal’s bloodied face shoots up, soon followed by sleek, veined fingers,  _ desiccated _ , dried out.

 

Already a collector of scars beneath his hardened flesh, he sleeps through most of them. A potent painkiller coursing through his battered form to numb his senses. He swims through the rolling Atlantic and fatigues himself enough to sink, only to be plucked right out of the blue towards the surface with the recurrent dream. Pooling over him, the deserved tranquility weighing him down in finality. He’s weary, exhausted yet alert. Like a fighter obstinately fighting until the end.

 

Awkwardly laying on his left side as fingers refuse to move beyond a half an inch, he states grimly. Not as a suggestion, but a cross between a demand and a statement. “You should tend to  _ your _ wounds, I don’t want you fucking scarred like I am.”

___

Mischa looked down at her arms. She had finally taken to bathing, washing the filth and reek from her skin, wondering if she’d ever really be clean. The rope burns stung and burned beneath the water, but the pain had been a blissful distraction. That sow had nicked her in the thigh, too, and it was still dribbling blood down her leg which she padded up with a towel. Nigel’s room had become the sight of a mock hospital room, old bandages discarded and the smell of disinfectant and bandages cloying the air. She’d have to clean at some point, but that wouldn’t be today.

 

“I will,” she said. She pressed the towel hard against her leg, wincing as the pain seemed to spread throughout her leg, despite it being small. She hadn’t even felt it until they had gotten home. “I need to make sure I don’t have to take you to an actual hospital first.” Fate would certainly have it that as soon as she turned to take care of herself, Nigel would have a seizure or something. It was utterly ridiculous, but she wasn’t about to take chances.

 

The elephant hung in the room between them, and unspoken whisper of fear and uneasiness. They were safe and Mason Verger was dead. Mischa had killed him, watched him be eaten alive with her own eyes. But she didn’t feel safe. Something was lurking in her mind, a false whisper that no matter where they went or what they did, something else would always be lurking in the dark, threatening to rip away what life that still had for its own treacherous fulfillment.

 

Mischa gently took his hand. It was bruised, and she kissed it tenderly. She wished her body would push past the wall of iron her mind had built and allow her to cry. It would be such a relief, to let out all the ugly anger and sadness built up inside her, to let herself feel something other than numb anxiety and physical pain from her wounds. She only signed, placing a gentle hand on Nigel’s cheek. Like old times.

 

“You’re not gonna die on me now, are you?” She smiled, a bitter laugh bubbling from her throat. She was teasing and he would be fine. She knew that. But it didn’t hurt to ask, did it? “Because after…all that… you really aren’t allowed. I won’t allow it, you understand me?“

 

Tears filled her eyes. Despite herself, despite Nigel laying on the bed before her, despite Hannibal and Mason and Cordell and despite their parents and everything they left behind, she cried. Her body hunched, her wounds stung, and her body felt weak and sore, but she cried and it was the greatest feeling in the world.

___

 

The scents of the ugly wretchedness of the pigpen, all the degrading associations of filth and exemplar presentation of how low humanity could sink are effectively masked by antiseptic and rubbing alcohol, the things he had very much familiarized himself with as his reckless lifestyle continued. Overruling the scent of his coagulated blood and heaviness of his limbs, detached, foreign and yet exceedingly rippling expanse of his skin. Soundlessly undulating, like the flame’s wavering outline like a wounded bird’s fluttering, with all of its might.

 

The air throbs with rapid pulses as if he feels like he has three hearts; his real one at the very core of him, constricted and twisted as far as it goes and the back of his right thigh, forcing himself to lay with such a vulnerable, fetal position as even the slightest inadvertent movement sends him to shriek internally with turbulent pricks and jabs. And his still recuperating head injury, as if the gray matter within his skull had been sucked into the center and then hollowed out in succession. A heartbeat of silence, then the incredible orchestration of discordant harmony full of broken instruments and inept treatment of them.

 

The human body is truly a marvelous thing, capable to produce about a million emotions without ever speaking. His glassy, unblinking, yet unfocused orbs, now dripping with rueful weariness as the lingering heat instinctively melts within his deathly pallid face, giving him a fleeting tinge of warmth and color.

 

As it draws out trickling tears, down over the side of his nose and the hollow spot over his upper lip, he lets out an incoherent, drawn-out howling as his answer. It bursts with a resolute  _ persistence _ and  _ perseverance _ . This wasn’t the only time he had been gravely injured and he had it worst when he had earned the scar that would send him closer to the unspeakable realm.  his lips pressed tight together to prevent all the coiled ungraceful noises from being uttered. Through his ashen and haggard face, the deathly paleness returns before he is faced with the manifestation of Mason’s herculean greed, unsatiated lust, amoral pleasure skyrocketing with the shedding of each tear, an ambrosia to how scurrilous and blasphemous the act is.

 

“No, if I fucking survived this uphill battle, I could climb Mount Everest for fucking god’s sake,” his drugged mind refuses to shut down into a lulling sinking feeling as he anchors himself with Mischa’s tease, sounding more like a softened demand.  _ A valiant iron maiden, his charge, his anchor. _ The ship without the anchor would end up in a ravaged wreckage in a merciless gale.

 

His battered body slowly absorbs the warmth, turning scalding hot lava as he helplessly watches. Bruised fingers tightly clutch into hers like a deeply rooted tree sucking up water and vitamins. His knee joints ache, the flaring undulation from where the tusk had jabbed through, there are ugly distortions of the flesh, and he could literally feel the invisible column project with such velocity that he’s hoisted up into the air multitudes of times. But the coldness is deep permeated within his bones and now the spilling warmth whispers through his clouded judgment. No, he would  _ survive _ this and  _ thrive _ ,  _ no matter how many labors he would have to go to champion through all of this. _


	12. Chapter 12

“Of course,” she whispered. “Of course.” Maybe, finally, knowing deep within her heart that he would really be okay, Mischa could rest. She didn’t ask if she could sleep with him; he would say yes regardless, and she wanted to be near him in case something were to happen. Making sure he was comfortable, she hastily changed into her nightgown and took to cleaning and bandaging her wounds. The rope burns stung like hellfire when met with a splash of alcohol, causing a flurry of curses and muttered growls under her breath as she tended to herself. Her ankles only hurt worse, but at least now, she would be well.

 

Weeks went by, and Nigel healed. Slowly, steadily,and not without pain and scarring and a lot of muscular weakness, but healing all the same. Soon, he was even walking around (Mischa cheered when this day finally came). Occasionally, Margot would stop in and offer to buy them groceries or give them extra medical supplies. It was often appreciated, and Mischa always laughed when Nigel referred to her as the “beefcake bodyguard” that even he was a bit intimidated by.

 

But although his injuries would heal, there had been another scar deeply etched into the fabric of his mind that Mischa didn’t know how to heal. Although Mischa had taken to sleeping beside him each night, he would frequently be awoken by terrible night terrors and a constricting of his chest where his brain told him that he could no longer breathe. All she was ever able to do was hold his hand, hug him, kiss his jaw with tenderness, and promise that it would be okay. To remind him that he was home, with her, and that Muskrat Farm was far behind them. He was so brittle in this state, and more often than not, Mischa felt utterly helpless.

 

She sat up with him one night, calming him down, instructing him to breathe easy. Once it was over, she rested her head upon his shoulder, trying not to let her helplessness overcome her when Nigel was the one that needed her so desperately to be strong.

 

“You should tell me what your nightmares are about,” she said, peering up at him. She held his hand tightly in hers, hoping to ease out whatever devil had possessed him back at the farm.

___

Bound by the confines of the mattress, there was only few he could manage before he gets lulled by the inescapable tenacity of the pull, of the numbing slumber that would exonerate him from the threatening images and reality. He’s at his weakest and lowest; as only a minute movement of his muscle sends him to be altered with a system-shocking brace of an invisible grasps. Unpredictable and unstable, yet the resounding strength weaved upon the body’s rectifiable cells. Lifted higher than ever before and showing his true color of his strength, the painfully tender exploration of his body continues in his deserved oblivion, as the brutality of the imminent fatality still mars the gray matter within his skull.

 

His mental re-enactment holds him in an inevitable vividness. No wonder the ribcage was called a ‘cage,’ because no matter how many times he goes through the palpable conclusion, of him making alive with a slim chance of seeing the light upon the world in this contumelious humiliation along with the hellfire flooding him whole, he could literally feel thrumming pulse continually knock upon the slatted enclosure. The knotted muscles entangle and coil further, shrinking and desiccating, the bubbling blood boils over within the chambers of his heart as each pump manifests itself into an indecipherable premonition of his gruesome death. With ejected meat of the brain along with lifeless empty gazes of maroon entrapped beneath sunken lids that still held the lingering flutter of inadvertent jerk.  

 

When he finally is able to pluck himself out of the multitudes of molds he had created upon the fibers of the sheets as more white watery discharge and sticky crimson had pinned him down, his heart leaps with joy and his constricted heart bursts with such spark of expanding energy that it’s unsettling. His body continues to sustain itself, but it’s methodical at best; like bound by a nonexistent treaty. Held accountable and responsible for things even he, couldn’t prevent.

 

The seeping colors had returned to his face, though his usual tanned form looks bleached beneath the slanted penumbra hanging like a permanent fixture. His tight chest ebb and flow with more ease, still holding thee violent rattle that had both shaken and petrified him into the ebony omen, the lake of fire and brimstone.

 

If he was to escape this agonizing memories from dominating both his mind and body, he needed to get this outside, out of his physical form. Not a moment longer.

 

The recollections, and a few possible diversions continue to stamp within his brain, burned into him like brands as a sempiternal echo of reverberating shriek and scream.  _ One particularly strange and bone-chilling dream leaves him standing in a heap of viscera and jagged bones and excrements, as he holds Hannibal’s ravaged skull, shrunken and chewed on pieces of skin hanging off the sharp lines of his cheekbones and forehead. _

 

_ The air feels stale, rancid and putrid as he watches the empty cavity of his skeletal remains, the gleaming white bearing every knick and clamping teeth of greed and all of his innards and savory parts wolfed down as his former glorious self reduces down to provocative exemplification of exerted violence and raw savagery. Empty gaze, facial muscles still baring the distorted pain as he had drenched in bottomless pit, sinking opposite the ether he had expected. He feels reducing down to lifeless branches and twigs, immobile and placid,useless and worthless.  _

___

Indeed, she was no healer, and certainly no psychiatrist as Hannibal had once aspired to be. She was a nursing student, and only knew the very basics of health and wound care from what she remembered from the little training she possessed. She  _ was _ a careful listener, a steady observer, and someone who cared very deeply for Nigel Lecter as he did her. And while it wasn’t something she could cure, it was something she hoped she could make more bearable for him as time stretched on before their gaze.

 

She explained to him that the way she saw it, the mind was always trying to make sense of their surroundings, make sense of the deep pain that all humans endure in one way or another. Those dreams he was having were like the mind trying to release the deadly torment it possessed; his mind was showing him these images to remind him that he was afraid, that he had survived all that had happened to him, if even just barely. Sometimes, she told him, writing these dreams down in a journal helped, from what Hannibal had told her when she had suffered nightmares of their parents dying as a very young girl.

 

“I’ll help you start the journal, if you’d be willing to try it,” she offered. “It could be good for you. And…for me, too. Writing is the healer of the soul, so to speak. At least that’s what I always think. I like writing about Lithuania and how the snow falls during the wintertime. I write about dancing and singing, and what it means to be a survivor.”

 

She offered him a small smile, hopeful and encouraging and eternally promising. And then, she kissed him, hands on his warm cheeks, lips seeking his eagerly and with a longing, singular need. It was a lover’s kiss, a kiss that shattered the strange barrier between platonic devotion and a partner’s dedication, if there was even a barrier at all to begin with. Those lines had been so blurry in their lives following their great tragedies, and they had sat contentedly behind those blurry lines for the sake of shattering the fragile, brittle livelihood they had built together. What would fracture into pieces may never be put back together, but the damage had already been done. And she loved him more than she loved the lonely security of a new life left unexplored.

 

“I love you,” she said simply, as if stating a fact as simple as a lowly math equation.

___

_ Strange and vivid, _ yet his breathless thump continues to crack and pulsate beneath him as each wistful and unsettling threads of memory shakes and tears him apart in shreds. Even when his distance gaze seemingly removes him to be locked in a third-person perspective as if he had been retelling this particular exploration of brutal indulgence with his own interpretation, it continues to hypnotize and bind him in an inescapable spell as he resurrects anew as a removed storyteller. Not one account would be the same as his body, in varying degrees of his latent energy brimming and bursting with renewed energy. That intensity of his innate fire continues burn through as he percolates the syllables.

 

Like a pitter-pattering rain soaking through the desolate drought of the sun-baked earth, it  _ alleviates _ , although  _ fleetingly _ . As if Mason had been holding the reins to the rattling chariots, his devious resolution unfolding even when he had emerged victorious upon the scurrilous exploitation based on visceral and taboo eroticism. His skewed legacy would live on, Nigel’s own kills would still mar his veins with a renewed virulence. The world evolved around riches and quiet clandestine violence. Perhaps his version, Mischa’s version of the story would tell it otherwise. He would recall the time of lethargy and devoid of liveliness with the scrawled words, already tracing through the curves of his brain.

 

“And liberating this oppressing and enclosing feeling. I feel like being sucked into the folds of the mountains we used to play in Lithuania,” a counterbalance to all things weighing him down, swallowing him up in a source of intense fear he wasn’t used to immersing into, or that strange, quiet peace that immediately associates him with their native country.  

 

All he knows is this might be his mind’s defense mechanisms to preserve his sanity in the long run. Yes, there’s no doubt these hours, stretching into a realm of eternity would leave a permanent scarring. Utterly without resistance, yet armored by the power of his own renunciation. Both feeling so deeply  _ human  _ and  _ monstrous _ . However deprecating, it also instilled a sense of incomparable energy, like bundles of electrical sparks discharging in the form of his convulsions and spasms.

 

Through the cloying pain manifesting into the inextinguishable bed of coal, itching to be kindled, Mischa’s kiss pumps up kicks, that last strength he needs to overcome and tread through this monstrosity. No matter how prodded and shaken upon, the illumination from her aura and the warmth from her lips slowly pushes through the darkness of his as it permeates through his chiseled face - his throat bobs, with the lasting stretch of memory claiming the expanse of his skin as a broken faucet creaks beneath his ministration. He’s overly  _ intuitive _ , yet rusty pipes of his bones slowly shine, regains its  _ luster _ and strengthens.

 

“I think I’m ready to take on that endeavor,” he would never be a guiltless and guileless with this experience drilling him upon like spears, he still finds solace upon the woods, which seem to blanket him with tranquil peace. “We would prevail, as long as eternity and as bottomless as a quicksand swamp.” 


	13. Chapter 13

“Oh, those mountains were beautiful,” she whispered excitedly. She was grinning from ear to ear, endlessly happy. For once in her life, she felt like nothing could go wrong. “Those mountains were like great castles looming in the distance of our home…hey—I used to tell Mama all the time that I wanted to climb to the top of that one in the distance. The tallest one. I wanted to be a queen, and…that tall mountain would be my throne. She told me, ‘Maybe someday, little Mischa, you’ll be big and strong and be able to climb it with your brothers.’ Or at least, I think she did.” Did her mother really say that? Mischa didn’t really remember. She was speaking in prose now, losing herself in the utter beauty of words and thoughts strung together to turn voice into art.

 

She stood from the bed, walking to the window, her voice gentler now.

 

“We should go someplace,” she said. “Now that you’ve healed. It might be good to get away from here for a while. I love this place, but everywhere I turn seems so frightful. I’m still so afraid of seeing his face in my dreams.”

 

Mischa didn’t know who would scare her more in a visit to her subconscious; Hannibal or Mason. She had new thoughts about her deceased brother, thoughts she didn’t know how to process or how to properly speak of. Perhaps leaving this small, wooded town would allow them both the healing that couldn’t be done with bandages or antiseptic.

 

It didn’t take long; they agreed on Italy. It had been someplace the siblings had always dreamed of, and Mischa proposed they could bring Hannibal’s ashes along with them, to give him the resting place he deserved. They could see Florence and Cicily, and take boats along the river. It didn’t have to be extravagant at all; as long as they were together. Looking at Nigel’s worn, battered face, she realized that he had suffered enough.  _ They _ had suffered enough. They would not forget the past, but indeed they would grow and move forward in their endeavors of embracing their sturdiness and willingness to survive. Continue to grow, continue to thrive, and live in one another’s presence that kept them well and happy and looking towards the sun.

 

_ We can only learn so much and live.  _ And perhaps, one day, this shattered teacup would mend itself and suddenly come together in a shattering reversal of entropy and desecration.

 

And if it didn’t, that too would be okay.

 

Indeed, Mischa would remember this for the rest of her days.

___

Those rippling curves of the peak and valleys seemed unconquerable when he had been a smaller, little pale boy. Smaller than his peers, he wasn’t that taller or heavier than Mischa was. Hannibal didn’t look that formidable either next to him, as he had the appearance of the typical Lithuanian boy who had retreated to his room, completely immersed in reading and drawing and writing. All the indoor activities which he despised. Nigel could be found outside the porch, restlessly sticking his tongue out in an attempt to gather permeating coolness of the snow crystals upon his tastebuds. With unknown impulse to let himself carried through the immaculate, unperturbed snow, he would return back to Lector Dvaras, quivering, his high cheekbones tinged peach pink and the icy pick of coldness seeping into his drenched clothes. No, the snow itself didn’t serve him as terror claws of the recollections of the past. Even that arctic chill had seeped his skin a healthy flush as he shook himself off from the desolate clutch of enervating grip of Mason’s reign of terror upon the Lecter blood.

 

So it all returns back to the torn pictures from few months ago. It’s so encasing, all the whirling stardusts of their past, Hannibal’s blood splatter patterns matching that of that particular visualization. How his own scars upon the numerous gashes that flared out from his pectorals, beneath the jutted collarbones and cheekbones, they’re the bloody celestial bodies which would form unbreakable links from the past, the present and the unknown future.

 

So much blood and tears had spilled forth within his dreams and now, as he sits faintly dazed, daydreams about scattering Hannibal’s ashes upon that very mountain. “I want us to carry his portion, we could let him free from the confines of his bones and burnt flesh by the winnowing wind.” His eyes seem like blood always refused to be wiped away, as bloodshot eyes speak with such raw zeal and slight anguish. Even the idea brightens the gloomy space and he agrees with a quite nod and a radiating smile, like the sunlight pouring through the window to clear that lingering ruefulness that had been weaved through his consciousness.

 

Dense and luxuriant, that’s how Nigel feels the moment he steps onto the familiar European soil, and beyond the waning yet dazzling afternoon light, the slightest rain patter over his light jacket and over the hoodie. Exiting their hotel in the midst of Florence where they could look over the striking dominance of  _ Santa Maria del Fiore _ , his fingers rake through Mischa’s hair, still slightly damp from the rain. All of a sudden, he remembers the time when all three had bathed together as children. Those evenings when he had washed her back and Hannibal had washed her hair. He could feel both of their tiny little hands running over his individually protruding vertebrae and realizes as adults, things weren’t that different. Her hands are still plastered onto his as they had been twenty years ago.

 

As he watches the whirling ectoplasm of Hannibal’s ash as it scatters in the midst of Amalfi coast as the cerulean drowsiness presses in on him, he watches the direction where the stardusts and carbon travel and let his body writhe in stinging ray and the last effectual fragility and delicateness. Empowered by the powerful caress as the last trace of their brother leaves their fingertips, he feels Hannibal’s presence melt into him, as his breakable bones and feels alive more than ever.

 

As this is the bulwark truth of all. The great soul would  _ live _ and  _ flourish _ . Just like after a hard and stormy winter, brings upon the halcyon spring.

 

_ The spring permeates through their minds and the perturbation is no more - as he leaps towards the edge of consciousness and slips into a bottomless sleep. _

 

He doesn’t get night terrors nor see Mason ravage havoc - the only image which fills his dream is the enticing recollections of those photos, snapshots manifesting fully into life as it had been so many times with rolling emotions.


End file.
